The grotesque in Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God

Abstract

This paper aims at analysing Cormac McCarthy’s novel Child of God through Mikhail Bakhtin’s perspective on the grotesque. Bakhtin’s theory is used as a bond between the text and the context, namely the story of the horrific murderer Lester Ballard and the Southern Gothic genre. The purpose of this endeavor is to illustrate that the combination between a synchronic and a diachronic approach to the novel reveals that the text focuses not so much on framing the social tensions of the South, but on creating a tale about humanity’s capacity for evil in general. This way, the analysis shows that the novel can be integrated into the Southern Gothic genre, but it is in no way limited in its interpretation by this classification.