The Victims in McCarthy's Child of GodIn Cormac McCarthy's Child of God, Lester Ballard is a recluse rejected by the people of his community. With his morose nature and bizarre habits, he stands out among the small rural community. Ballard, rejected, goes from being a harmless recluse to being a murderer. While he is clearly an aggressor, he is also a victim himself. He is the victim of his own ostracization by the community of which he was a part. Although the victimization he experiences cannot justify his violent actions, it does provide an explanation for how Ballard came to the point of becoming an abuser himself. Lester Ballard is a loner who is forced to leave his property and takes refuge in an abandoned barn hidden in the woods. He doesn't have a job and often has difficulty relating to people in his own town. He lives day to day on the provisions he can find in the woods and what he can get in town. He spends his days wandering in the woods or in town. He rarely associates with the locals and takes more pleasure in whiskey than in the presence of others. A few stuffed animals he wins at a fair serve as his only company. The corpse of a young woman that he stumbles upon in the woods becomes his first sexual companion. Ballard treats the corpse as he would a woman, buying it clothes, whispering in its ear, and laying it next to him when it falls asleep. Although these actions seem deranged, they also seem to be his way of finding the closest replacements for the social companionship he has been denied in life. Unlike the young women of the city, a woman's corpse cannot be made fun of or insulted by its... middle of paper ......he would suffer. The people of his community always had low expectations of Ballard and gave him no reason to fear what they might think of him. Lester Ballard is an abuser of innocent people, and this is the result of his own isolation. Although little information about his mind is provided, existing evidence of his lifestyle has provided some explanations as to why he committed these crimes. Members of his community, wanting to distance themselves from any association with Ballard, coincided with the development of his bizarre actions. Thus, Ballard is absolutely not held back by any idea of ​​helping society. He is the product of a society that has turned its back on an individual it prefers to despise rather than be associated with. Works Cited: McCarthy, Cormac. Child of God. New York: vintage books, 1973.