“Disorder in the woods, trees down, new paths needed”: the wild man and child of God

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Date
2019
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University of Alabama Libraries
Abstract

In criticism of Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God, there is a tendency to portray Lester Ballard as inevitably monstrous. While numerous critics have acknowledged Lester’s humanness, the moral ambiguity of Lester is greatly diminished after their discussions of his crimes. This essay differs from those essays in that I emphasize Lester’s moral ambiguity through utilizing the mythical Wild Man. To do this, I draw on Hayden White’s discussion of the Wild Man in his book The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism. The Wild Man is inextricable from his environment, the wilderness, and Lester, too, becomes inextricable from the wilderness after he devolves into a Wild Man-like figure. But Lester—importantly—retains his humanness, however diminished. He is therefore what I term a quasi-Wild Man. In highlighting Lester’s moral ambiguity, the ambiguity of Sevier County’s wilderness is evident; the wilderness can accommodate the desires of both man and monster.

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Electronic Thesis or Dissertation
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American literature
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