LITERATURE: Child of God – Foreshadowing

Lester’s first murder of a woman is born of the egg of rejection with the sperm he’s left inside a woman he found dead in a car (boy, that’s a whole psychological story right there that I won’t go into because it got worse).  After his home, such as it is, burns down, he lives in a cave.  What we see is him shooting a woman who’s spurned him, and while we know what he’s done with the first woman he found dead, it is only when he returns to the cave after his trip downtown to sell watches (we know where he probably has gotten them), and kicks at the ashes of his campfire in the cave that we learn a bit more:

Ballard kicked at the fire and turned a few dull cherry coals up out of the ash and bones.  (p. 133)

Then as we follow him down deeper into the earth through the natural caverns and passageways, we’re once again hit with horror:

Here in the bowels of the mountain Ballard turned his light on the ledges or pallets of stone where dead people lay like saints.  (p. 135)

So the turning of Lester into a serial murderer has been foreshadowed by his first murder, while we become suspicious of his actions we discover them to be true and yet they still hit us like a ton of bricks with the audacity of what he’s doing to the bodies.  McCarthy’s foreshadowing is a strange twist of letting us know the crime, and then subtly weaving it into the most mundane of actions where it lies like a rock in the middle of your stomach.

We still aren’t sure what drives Lester Ballard, but we see suggestions of his own lack of insight:

Disorder in the woods, trees down, new paths needed.  Given charge, Ballard would have made things more orderly in the woods and in men’s souls.  (p. 136)

With the advent of this weather bats began to stir from somewhere deep in the cave.  Ballard lying on his pallet by the fire one evening saw them come from the dark of the tunnel and ascent through the hole overhead fluttering wildly in the ask and smoke like souls rising from hades.  When they were gone he watched the hordes of cold stars sprawled across the smokehole and wondered what stuff they were made of, or himself.  (p. 141)

Ballard moves through life on instinct, but we see only the worst of man in his resolutions of his problems.  He seems to be unaware of the nature of what he is doing, and yet he is a man who lives by natural laws of the animalistic tendencies of man.  Born clean, ruined by life?  Or born with simply a need for survival and untouched by civilization?  Which came first…?