SOURCE: "From Voyeurism to Archaeology: Cormac McCarthy's Child of God," in The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. XXIV, No. 1, Fall, 1991, pp. 3-15.

In the following essay, Bartlett examines the novel Child of God, focusing on the various narrative perspectives within the book, most notably the voyeuristic perspective that is often employed.

Readers who find Cormac McCarthy's Child of God disturbingly powerful might well argue that this power results from the "raw material" of its antihero. Lester Ballard is a twenty-seven-year-old white native of Frog Mountain in Appalachian Sevier County, Tennessee: a cursing, spitting, vengeful, homicidal, necrophilic sociopath. This grotesque outsider could serve as stuff for a gratuitously shocking horror story. But Ballard represents a serious figure for McCarthy—not primarily a case study in psychology or criminology, but a fictional figure quite within the bounds of human possibility. Some degrees of human evil prove difficult to apprehend, must be...