52 pages • 1 hour read
Cormac McCarthyChild of God
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1973A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Pages 90-112 Summary
The following December at the Frog Mountain lookout, Lester, out hunting squirrels, finds a couple inexplicably dead in their car. Lester pulls the man off the woman and is surprised by the man’s still-erect penis. Turning off the engine and closing the car door against the cold, Lester has sex with a woman’s corpse, “pour[ing] into that waxen ear everything he’d ever thought of saying to a woman” (93). Lester leaves with the woman’s underwear, only to sprint back to search the car for valuables. He steals their money, the woman’s makeup, and a pint of whiskey. Again, he departs, before returning again for the woman’s corpse. As he returns up the road this final time, a hawk wheels overhead.
Lester lugs the corpse to his cabin. He builds a fire, undresses the corpse, and climbs into bed next to it. Later that afternoon, two men to whom Mr. Waldrop has given permission to hunt on his property appear unexpectedly. Worried that they’ll see the corpse, Lester scares them away. He cleans a spot in the loft and, using a rope and a ladder, hauls up the corpse. Lifted by the rope, the corpse appears reanimated.
Lester makes a squirrel stew then hides the ladder and walks three hours into Sevierville. At a clothing store attended by a woman, Lester stumbles his way through the purchase of a red dress and set of lingerie. Then, he goes to buy food. The owner of the general store, Mr. Fox, mentions that it’s forecast to drop to three degrees that night and that a dead man was found at the lookout.
Back at his cabin, Lester builds a massive fire against the cold and brings the woman’s corpse down from the loft to defrost. When she does, he applies her makeup, dresses her in the red dress and lingerie, and poses her in different ways. He goes outside to look in the window at each of these poses. Talking to the corpse, he slowly undresses it and has sex with it. After returning it to the loft, Lester stuffs the fireplace with wood up into the chimney and dares the night to freeze.
It has dropped below zero when Lester awakes to a room full of smoke: The loft has caught fire. Cursing, Lester ferries his rifle and his other possessions outside before returning for the corpse. The fire in the loft is too hot, so Lester abandons the corpse and returns outside with only his stuffed animals. In awe, he watches as flames engulf the cabin.
Before morning, the fire burns to embers, and Lester wakes to the cold. He builds a nest of weeds by the still-warm hearth and makes coffee. Although he often talks to himself, he doesn’t say anything now. When the sun rises, Lester searches through the ashes. He finds no trace of the woman.
Lester moves his possessions up a mountain to a cave. There, the remains of a long-dead fire lay under a skylight in the rock. Using embers from the cabin, Lester starts his own fire.
Part 2, Pages 113-127 Summary
At night Lester starts returning to his former farmhouse to aim his rifle through the window at John Greer reading seed catalogs by the fire.
Lester returns to the dump to find that all but one of Reubel’s daughters have fled. Reubel laments having children who curse him and congratulates Lester for never marrying. When the topic of the fire arises, Reubel mentions a local man, Parton, who burned to death asleep in his house. Lester asks if they found his remains.
One rainy day, Lester encounters John Greer. Lester tries to pass him, but Greer blocks his way. When Greer asks if he’s Lester Ballard, Lester keeps his head down and says no before continuing on. Some days later, Lester’s friend Kirby is caught selling whiskey; he will soon be imprisoned. Lester commiserates with him.
Lester returns to Ralph’s house. The elder daughter reluctantly lets in Lester; Ralph isn’t home. Eyeing the boy and the woman, Lester accuses her of being the boy’s mother by a local boy. She adamantly denies it and says to Lester, “You’re just a crazy thing” (121). Lester asks her to show him her breasts. She orders him to leave.
Lester retrieves the rifle he stashed outside and shoots the elder Lane girl through the window. He scrabbles for the ejected shell but can’t find it and tries to reenter the door she locked when he left. When Lester returns inside, she is still alive. He curses at her to die, and she does. Lester sets fire to the house and carries out the girl’s corpse, leaving Billy to burn.
Some days later, the Sheriff brings in Lester at gunpoint. At the station, an unidentified man (presumably the district’s attorney) asks why Lester tried to hide when he saw the Sheriff and whether he burned down Mr. Waldrop’s cabin. Lester denies wrongdoing in both cases, arguing that the Sheriff has it out for him. The district’s attorney tells Lester, “You are either going to have to find some other way to live or some other place in the world to do it in” (127).
Part 2, Pages 128-151 Summary
Harried, Lester buys food at Mr. Fox’s general store. After letting Lester pick out groceries, Mr. Fox refuses to let Lester put them on his tab, which has grown to over $34. Lester offers to pay $4. Mr. Fox insults Lester—saying that as a 27-year-old he should have more than $4 to his name—and calculates that at the current rate, it will take Lester 194 years to repay the full tab. Enraged, Lester refuses Mr. Fox’s suggestion to return some of his groceries and slaps down $5.10—their full price.
On a Sunday in February Lester crosses Frog Mountain into Blount County. The forest on that side of the mountain is at once magical and foreboding:
It was almost noon and the sun was very bright on the snow and the snow shone with a myriad crystal incandescence. The shrouded road wound off before him almost lost among the trees and a stream ran beside the road, dark under bowers of ice, small glass-fanged caverns beneath tree roots where the water sucked unseen (134).
Lester eats a ribbon of frost that has formed on a roadside weed. At the general store in Blount County, he warms himself by the fire, forcing conversation with the men gathered there. Lester offers to sell them three wristwatches; the men suspect that they are stolen. Nevertheless, after some negotiation, one man agrees to buy all three. The man begins peddling them to his companions for more than he paid.
Lester returns to the underside of a bridge where he had stashed his rifle. At first, he can’t find it and becomes frantic. After he finds it, he yells curses at the thief he imagined.
In his cave, Lester has arranged his stuffed animals on his mattress against the wall. Leaving his main room, Lester deftly navigates deeper into the cave system. Water drips and flows everywhere, distorting the light of his lamp “as if bent back by some strange underground force” (141). A narrow, mile-long watercourse debouches into a vaulted cavern with muddy, blood-red walls. On stone ledges lay corpses in repose.
Trees fall across the paths Lester has made on the mountain. He wishes the world—including people—were more orderly. After a heavy snow, Lester trudges with his rifle to Greer’s place. Lester can hear Greer chopping wood. Lester sneaks into the barn, steals corn and eggs, and strangles a chicken. Another day Lester returns with his rifle only to find Greer absent. As Lester leaves, he tells the snow to fall more heavily, and it does.
After the snow stops, Lester returns to Greer’s place every day. He talks to himself about strange plans and wears the underwear, clothes, and makeup of his female victims. His shoes, muddy from the vaulted cavern, make blood-red tracks in the snow. At night, bats swarm out of a deeper part of the cave while Lester gazes at the stars through the skylight, wondering what comprises them.
Part 2 Analysis
In Part II, the change of setting drives a change in Lester, accelerating his corruption and heightening the Gothic aesthetic, particularly the intimation of supernatural forces.
The first scene of Part II exhibits a motif characteristic of the Gothic: the grotesque. In the grotesque, uncanny events and unnatural combinations produce not only horror but comedy. The first uncanny occurrence is the unexplained deaths of the couple in the car. This discovery sets the tone for the scene. The plausible explanation is that the car heater pulled exhaust into the cabin, poisoning them; however, that this is left ambiguous opens the door for both Lester and the reader to ascribe supernatural causes to their deaths. To Lester, this occurrence is a rare stroke of good luck—a godsend—in that it shows him an outlet for his long-frustrated lust: necrophilia.
Lester’s uncanny discovery becomes grotesque after he enters the car. When he rolls over the dead man, the surprise of his still-erect penis startles Lester back out of the car. The tone then veers back into pure horror as Lester returns to the car to have sex with the dead woman. Afterward, the tone shifts back toward the comedic as Lester repeatedly leaves and then frantically returns to the car, first to restart the engine, then to steal valuables, then to steal the woman’s corpse. The almost slapstick choreography of the scene—the jerky movement of Lester walking away from then sprinting back to the car—provides some comic relief while also illustrating Lester’s hesitancy and uncertainty in his first encounter with a dead woman.
Lester soon sheds this hesitancy. His trajectory toward his nadir continues with his murder of the elder Lane daughter. This murder is significant because it is the first he commits in service of the grotesque fulfillment of his sexual urges and longing for companionship. Lester also commits this murder and the subsequent arson out of spite and revenge. Having just lost his cabin to a fire of his own making—a fire he blames on his perceived persecution by the universe—Lester enacts what he sees as a cosmic, karmic retribution, burning down someone else’s home. As for the murder, he commits it partly out of spite: He resents that the Lane girl says to him, “You ain’t even a man. You’re just a crazy thing” (129) and wants to prove to himself, and to her, his response: “I might be more than you think” (129). However, by murdering her, Lester proves her right: He is cowardly and psychopathic, not a man at all. However, McCarthy hints, this doesn’t mean that Lester is inhuman—one meaning of the Lane girl’s insult—or “crazy”; his actions are evidence not of some alien monstrosity but of The Violence Inherent to Humanity.
McCarthy also uses the setting to illustrate Lester’s devolution and to hint at an ineradicable, almost supernatural violence native to Sevier County. Lester’s move from the cabin to the cave marks a regression to a primitive way of being; in taking Lester farther away from human civilization, the move furthers his alienation from the civilized mind. The isolated, Paleolithic environment conduces to animistic interpretations of the world. As Lester navigates down the watercourse to the chamber where he keeps the corpses, the light from his lamp “glance[s] from the surface of the pool unaltered, as if bent back by some strange underground force” (141). This intimation of the supernatural is compounded by McCarthy’s description of the chamber itself: “The walls with their softlooking convolutions, slavered over as they were with wet and bloodred mud, had an organic look to them, like the innards of some great beast” (142). The anatomical imagery conjures the sense that the mountain is alive, that some giant, primeval golem comprises the mountain. This Gothic sense of haunting, of evil habitation, contributes to the sense that Lester isn’t an anomaly but an incarnation of a violent energy endogenous to the setting.
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