(2005) No Country for Old Men

Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning.

Plot Summary

Set in south Texas in 1982, No Country for Old Men opens with Llewelyn Moss, a hunter and war veteran, who stumbles upon the remains of a violent drug deal and $2 million.  He takes the money, but is immediately pursued by those seeking it, especially the ominous and violent hit man Anton Chigurh. Moss sends his wife, Carla Jean, away for protection while he tries, and fails, to outrun the ghost-like Chigurh. Ed Tom Bell, the sheriff and WWII veteran, struggles to maintain peace and security amid the growing violence of the country. He is critical of himself and his ability to preserve peace and catch Chigurh, but he survives due to the love and companionship of his wife. Chigurh eliminates Moss but is never caught by the authorities, and even though he gets wounded, he remains impossible to catch or kill. Bell retires as sheriff but sustains his hope in humanity even though people like Chigurh are still free.

Critical Analysis

Although Cormac McCarthy uses a simpler style and narrative structure in No Country for Old Men than in his previous novels, he continues to examine philosophical themes and ideas through the experiences of his characters. Through Bell, Chigurh and Moss, McCarthy explores determinism and free will, nostalgia for the past, and the importance of humanity and love.

Like Judge Holden in Blood Meridian, Chigurh’s deterministic philosophy relies on coins as instruments. Chigurh mysteriously asks many characters to participate in a coin toss. When Chigurh initiates the coin toss with an unsuspecting attendant at a filling station, the man demands, “Well I need to know what we’re calling here” and Chigurh responds: “How would that change anything?” (NCFOM56). Thus, according to Chigurh, the actual purpose for the coin toss is inconsequential because fate has already been decided. According to Linda Woodson’s essay, “’You are the battleground’: Materiality, Moral Responsibility, and Determinism in No Country for Old Men,” Roman society used the coin toss as a method of revealing an already determined outcome rather than a way to decide the fate of a person: “Readers only assume that it is a life-or-death toss based upon their knowledge of Chigurh as a killer. Thus, the outcome is still fully hidden in the mind of Chigurh, and perhaps, like the Romans, he is waiting for revelation of determined fate” (Woodson 7). Since the outcome has already been decided, action and free will become meaningless.

Moss, however, refuses to accept Chigurh’s nihilistic determinism because he believes that he can control the consequences of taking the money. He recognizes that it is impossible to undo his actions, but he continues to assert that it was his choice, not some predetermined destiny, that resulted in his situation with Chigurh. As he tells a young hitchhiker, “Your notions about startin over. Or anybody's. You dont start over. That's what it's about. Every step you take is forever. You can't make it go away. None of it,” (NCFOM 227). According to Moss, every step he took in the past led to his present. Chigurh, however, would blame Moss’s predicament on a higher power, and therefore deny his free will.

Although Chigurh denies the independence of his victims, he also eliminates his own sovereignty. He functions as an instrument of a higher power: “Chigurh, on the other hand, sees himself not as having the power to pull together the strings of an absolute destiny, but rather as an ‘instrument’ of that which has already been determined” (Woodson 6). The outcome of the coin toss is the ultimate authority, not Chigurh. Even if he had wanted to kill the attendant at the filling station, his ideology forces him to obey the revelation of the coin toss.

Chigurh’s deference to the will of the world is most apparent in his conversation with Carla Jean. Unlike any of the other men killed by Chigurh, she understands his philosophy and his reason for adhering to the coin’s decision. As he explains before he kills her,

You're asking that I make myself vulnerable and that I can never do. I have only one way to live. It doesn't allow for special cases . . . Do you understand? When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That there could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way. You're asking that I second say the world. Do you see? (259-260).

Since Moss rejected Chigurh’s offer to spare Carla Jean’s life, and because Chigurh claims he is controlled by fate and destinty, letting her live was not even an option.

Bell, however, maintains his free will when he resigns as sheriff because he refuses to subject himself to Chigurh’s deterministic ideology. In his essay “No Allegory for Casual Readers,” John Vanderheide states that Bell’s humanity and free will depend on his rejection of old heroism (34). As Bell states in the novel’s opening:

Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I dont want to confront him. I know he's real. I have seen his work. I walked in front of those eyes once. I wont do it again . . . I cant say that it's even what you are willin to do. Because I always knew that you had to be willin to die to even do this job. That was always true . . . I think it is more like what you are willin to become. And I think a man would have to put his soul at hazard. And I wont do that (4).

In order to stop Chigurh, Bell would have to become Chigurh, which would destroy his free will because it would force him to define his life through violence and arbitrary coin tosses. Because he does not choose to battle Chigurh’s nihilism directly, Bell is able to maintain his humanity.

Bell’s humanity entails that, like the rest of us, he must have flaws. Through Bell’s interior monologues, McCarthy addresses his flawed nostalgic conception of a nonexistent country. “This country was hard on people. But they never seemed to hold it to account . . . This country will kill you in a heartbeat and still people love it” (NCFOM 271). He imagines a country that does not contain the brutal violence and greed of the modern world, but as the title of the novel implies, there is no country for old men. Bell and his friend, Ellis, remain nostalgic for a country and a life they can never regain. However, Bell realizes that his constant idealization of the past has consumed his entire present and future. He admits to Ellis:

And some part of me has never quit wishin I could go back. And I cant. I didn’t know you could steal your own life. And I didn’t know that it would bring you no more benefit than about anything else you might steal. I think I done the best with it I knew how but it still wasn’t mine. It never has been (278).

Now reaching the end of his life, Bell understands that his nostalgia has taken over his entire existence.

Bell’s idealization of the past makes it difficult for him to accept the violence and brutality of the modern world. As Steven Frye states in Understanding Cormac McCarthy, “ [Bell] loves to hear stories of old-time lawmen . . . He imagines a past defined by virtue and social order, an ethos of personal responsibility reflected in manners and pristine codes of external behavior” (157). Bell constantly compares the present state of the world to the past that he idealizes, which only hinders his ability to deal with the issues in modern society.

Though he is unable to completely escape his nostalgia for the past, Bell’s relationships save him from becoming like Chigurh. For example, Bell maintains his connection to his dead daughter. This form of human interaction, though unconventional, enables Bell to maintain his identity. According to Lydia R. Cooper’s essay, “He’s a Psychopathic Killer, but So What?: Folklore and Morality in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men,” Bell’s humanity depend on his human connections. “Bell defines himself as a composite self, a self whose core identity exists in constant relation to other people. Love and goodness, for Bell, occur only in relationship” (56).

Bell’s most defining relationship is his marriage to Loretta.  According to Frye’s essay, “Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ and McCarthy’sNo Country for Old Men: Art and Artifice in the Novel,” marriage and love is his sanctuary from the violence and brutality of the world. “If I didnt have her I dont know what I would have. Well, yes I do. You wouldnt need a box to put it in, neither” (NCFOM 305). Without her, Bell would become soulless and nihilistic, much like Chigurh. He knows that his relationships are what keep him human, and he values that more than he values his own life. “Don’t jump Sheriff. She aint worth it . . . Bell smiled. Truth of the matter is, he said, she is” (NCFOM 170).

NCFOM ‘s foregrounding of human relationships gives a sense of hope for humanity, which makes it unique from many of McCarthy’s early novels. The novel ends with Bell relating his dream interaction with his father. Even though he does not know how the world will change or where it will take him next, Bell has faith that his relationships will protect him. “And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up” (NCFOM 309). The future may be even more violent and tragic, but Bell’s human connections will enable him to persevere.

Although a faster read than many other McCarthy novels, NCFOM continues to examine complex issues of free will, fate, and nostalgia. However, it concludes on a hopeful note, and despite the violence and nihilism of Chigurh, we are left with the sense that humanity will prevail. McCarthy once again provides multiple perspectives and no definitive answers, leaving readers to explore their own interpretations.

by Jessica Yee