A Psychoanalytical Reading of Cormac McCarthy’s The Child of God

M.L. Eileen Brisha, Dr. M. Sagaya Sophia

Abstract


Cormac McCarthy is an acclaimed author of America who is well known for the depiction of the South, especially with its gloomy, murky, and ghostly setup. His characters are mostly fallen with despair and tensions which are the prevailing elements in his novels. The presence of haunting feeling overtakes the readers with unexpected twists and bump into awkward characters. His novel Child of God portrays Lester Ballard who is mentally disturbed as he is been ignored by society. This withdrawal from society is forced on him and his reactions to the rigid society make him an outlaw and push him further to the periphery. His mental declination is due to rejection and lack of connection with society. This paper thus focuses on the psychological changes in the main character in the light of Freud’s psychoanalysis.


Keywords


Psychoanalysis, Necrophilia, Isolation, Transference, Displacement, Repression.

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References


McCarthy, Cormac. Child of God. Picador. London. 2010. Print.

Lang, John. “Lester Ballard: McCarthy’s Challenge to the Reader’s Compassion.” Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy. Ed. Wade Hall and Rick Wallach. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1995. 87-94. Print.

Jay Ellis, No Place for Home: Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy. (New York and London: Routledge, 2006).

Bartlett, Andrew. ‘From Voyeurism to Archaeology’: Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God, Southern Literary Journal 24 (Fall 1991): 3-15.


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