One Drive, Two Deaths in Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God

This article will offer a reading of Child of God that integrates the supposedly black and white discourses of theology and psychoanalytic theory. One of the main themes in Child of God is the close relationship between sex and death as drives that shape human action and fate. These drives, as fundamental to human nature, have most notably been theorized by Freud. Accordingly, this article argues that in Child of God McCarthy offers a vision of reality in which the sex and death drives are situated in the greater context of a Christian metaphysics of self, thereby repositioning certain Freudian insights within a view of reality repudiated by Freud.