“A Child of God Much Like YourselfPerhaps”: An Ecocritical Reading of Cormac McCarthy'sChild of God

ormac McCarthy’s fiction has been widely studied through the lens of Ecocriticism, probablybecause nature plays a prominent role in his novels in which the setting is often a decisivenarrative element. The most relevant environmental analyses concernThe Trilogy Border novels,Blood Meridian and, of course,The Road, a post-apocalyptic novel fundamentally centered on theenvironment issue. This study investigates McCarthy’sChild of God, his shortest novel, from anecocritical point of view, despite the apparent absence of environmental characters in the book.Child of Godcouldbe considered McCarthy’s early concern with the Twentieth-century industrialdevelopment’s impact on the environment: the early dissolution of the protagonist’s family farm,taken away by the State, for instance, coincides with the start of the human dissolution of theprotagonist, a psychopath murderer. Here, McCarthy’s defiance of the environmentally recklesspresent is equated with the mental illness of the protagonist, Lester Ballard. By investigating oneof McCarthy's most significant early novels through an ecocritical approach, it will be possible tobetter understand the author’s environmental turning point in his late novels as well