Penindasan Ideologis Terhadap Tokoh Utama dalam Novel Child of God karya McCarthy = Ideological Oppression of Main Character in McCarthy’s Child of God

M. Fajar Zulfah Nur T. Ideological Oppression of Main character in McCarthy’s Child of God (Supervised by Dr. Abbas, S.S., M.Hum.). This study examines Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God through an interdisciplinary framework that integrates Terry Eagleton’s Marxist theory of ideology and Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic concept of abjection. The research investigates how ideological structures define morality, normality, and exclusion within the social world of the novel, and how these structures intersect with the psychological and bodily degradation of the protagonist, Lester Ballard. Using qualitative textual analysis, this study demonstrates that Ballard’s transformation into a monstrous figure is not solely the result of individual pathology, but a product of systematic dispossession, social neglect, and ideological exclusion. Through community practices, legal institutions, religious authority, and everyday discourse, Ballard is gradually positioned as an abject subject, one who exists outside the symbolic order yet remains necessary for the community’s moral self-definition. His physical decay, regression into animalistic behavior, and ultimate reduction to an anatomical object exemplify Kristeva’s notion of abjection as the collapse of boundaries between subject and object, life and death, humanity and matter. The findings reveal that Child of God offers a radical critique of social ideology by exposing how societies produce, manage, and ultimately discard their own “abject others”. McCarthy’s novel thus reframes monstrosity as a structural outcome of ideological systems rather than a deviation from them, highlighting the inseparability of social, ideological, and psychological forces in the formation of human identity.