The structure of narrative in Cormac McCarthy's Child of God
Date
2013
Authors
Williams, Scott C., author
Taylor, Cynthia H., advisor
Gage, Scott, committee member
Hudock, Sandy, committee member
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Abstract
This thesis argued an alternative, sub-textual, reading of Cormac McCarthy's third novel, Child of God , through an in depth study of the novel's structure of narrative. The alternative reading revealed the novel's multiple narrators' biased judgments toward their subject, the novel's protagonist, Lester Ballard, through the narratives they tell. Those biased judgments also revealed both the hypocrisy of the local tellers of the anecdotes and, in turn, the subjective nature of moral truth. Moreover, the examination of the sub-textual reading through narrative theory--particularly drawing from Seymour Chatman's study, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film--also delineated the novel's self-regulated and meta-narrative structure in detail by revealing the dynamics of the relationship between the dominant child of God narrative and the seven shorter local anecdotal narratives, such as how the child of God narrative evolved from the smaller local anecdotes. This thesis concluded that the novel, Child of God, is about the tellers and their construction of moral truth: that the seven local narratives have a greater significance then as mere exposition to the dominant child of God narrative that most critiques either suggest or assume is the novel. This thesis further concluded that the structure of narrative in Child of God indicated that Cormac McCarthy's early works--his Appalachian period--are as complex and architecturally crafted as is recognized in his later novels.