66 pages • 2 hours read
Cormac McCarthyNo Country for Old Men
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Good versus Evil
Sheriff Bell and his fellow sheriffs seem to recognize that a change is happening in their jurisdictions. The kind of crimes, the number and violence of them, overwhelms and saddens them. Drugs have brought great evil into southwest Texas.
Bell in particular wrestles with this form of evil—in contrast with normal human stupidity, exemplified by Llewelyn taking the drug money—in trying to save Llewelyn and Carla Jean Moss. Sheriff Bell recognizes that in order to understand and defeat a man like Chigurh he would have to start thinking like him. Thinking like a cold-blooded, soulless killer would change him and take him to the edge of a moral abyss. Bell refuses to go there; he states this in the opening of the novel, foreshadowing that the serial killer with no soul, Chigurh, is never caught and never brought to account, legally, for his crimes.
Bell finds it impossible to reconcile what he learns of human nature during this investigation with his desire to make a positive difference in his community. As a result, he retires, unable to cope with the changes in the criminals that he sees taking over the world around him. There is no real legal justice anymore: no possibility of righting an evil so disturbing and wrong. Bell finds that he has no role, or no role that he will accept, in such a world.
McCarthy intends for the deaths of so many characters—particularly Llewelyn and Carla Jean Moss—to resonate with the theme of the fight between good and evil.
Sheriff Bell’s struggle to protect the people of Terrell County against evil leaves him too worn out to fight another day. Though he confronts his limits, his struggle is not worthless. Other men must pick up where he left off. The other sheriffs in the counties he visits through the novel all sound like Bell himself and reinforce the view that there are many of them left, still fighting the good fight.
Evil triumphs, but is not unscathed—as suggested by Chigurh’s car accident after killing Carla Jean and the Mexican drug dealer’s death sentence. Despite the death and destruction depicted in this novel, particularly embodied by the character Anton Chigurh, the novel does not end on a pessimistic note. In the final scene, Bell dreams that his father, riding a horse, carries with him a light into the cold darkness ahead, lighting the way for Bell to follow after him.
Man’s Laws versus Moral Law
Man’s law and its representatives—Sheriff Bell and his colleagues—are on trial throughout the novel, and they are powerless to stand against the tide of evil rolling through Texas in the form of the drug trade. With the failure of man’s law, McCarthy indicates that man’s moral imagination must mature enough to find a way to grapple with the immorality and evil attempting to destroy civilization.
The characters who depend on and count on the morality of man’s law to save them are defeated: Sheriff Bell, Carla Jean, and Llewelyn Moss. In different ways, they all fail to recognize the true nature of their enemy and therefore they fail to martial their forces for battle accordingly.
The characters who are defeated but survive come to depend on a moral law rather than man’s law. Sheriff Bell comes to this realization; though he wants to see them as one and the same, he is forced to see the flaws in the system and to separate legality from morality.
Sheriff Bell comments that if Satan had planned to eliminate human beings from the planet, he would have invented narcotics. Furthermore, Bell notices that the criminals he faces are different than they were in the past; they are a new breed without “souls” or a morality he recognizes.
The value of human life to a man without a soul is nothing. Chigurh kills people like cattle, and he flips a coin, if he’s in a mood to offer a person a way out. He kills people he has even minor disagreements with, and his peculiar but strongly-held, convictions lead him to kill everyone he has “promised” himself he would kill. However, his fatalistic views simply serve as a way for him to justify killing.
The old-fashioned killers, those with moral codes, seem unable to compete with or defeat men without souls; even the hit man Carson Wells fails to account for the depth of his enemy’s cunning immorality. Likewise, Carla Jean and Llewelyn Moss are preoccupied with the legality of what they might be held accountable for, not the moral dimension of Llewelyn’s actions. Caught up in Sheriff Bell’s world, where legal and moral choices coincide and have meaning, they fail to account for a vision outside of the legal and moral code they understand and live by.
Hope for the future, however, is suggested by Carla Jean Moss’ confrontation with Chigurh when she challenges his fatalistic philosophy. Simply by killing Carla Jean, Chigurh’s fatalistic view is exposed as the mockery and sham that it is. Furthermore, Bell leaves the legal world and moves on with his life, though it is difficult. Symbolically, he chooses his home life, represented by his devout and beloved wife’s morality, over continuing to represent man’s law, in which he no longer believes.
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