Country for Old Men by

¶ … Country for Old Men" by Cormac Mccarthy Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men takes its title from William Butler Yeats' famous poem Sailing to Byzantium. The title therefore already announces the main theme of the book: the sideslip of the modern world towards evil and depravity.

The fast paced action of the novel and the sketchy descriptions make of the book a Western and even a literary thriller, but, at a deeper level, the text is fraught with profound meanings about the battle between the forces of evil and the forces of good. McCarthy's world is filled with too much corruption and evil and too little good. The chain of gruesome crimes and amoral deeds pervades the whole of the novel.

McCarthy thus depicts the modern world as a state of things in which the equipoise between good and evil is lost. This why the world is no longer fitted for old men who belong to a more balanced and ordered state of things. The characters in the novel reflect this division between the antagonist principles of good and evil. The plot revolves around the Llewellyn Moss' adventures in Texas in the nineteen eighties, after he accidentally becomes involved in the aftermath of drug-dealers' affair.

While he is antelope hunting in the deserts of Texas, Moss stumbles on a huge amount of money and the murdered bodies of those who had been killed in the massacre. While Moss seems to be on the edge that separates good from evil, the novel has two other characters which are completely antagonistic. Thus, Anton Chigurh is a sociopath who never makes scruples, the very face of absolute evil. He is a completely amoral character, capable of cold blooded murder without a second thought.

At the opposite pole there is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who is the true representative of justice. More than a full-fledged character, Sheriff Bell is a voice pervading the thick web of the novel with its dispersed but profound and philosophical commentaries.

Bell is the 'old man' who deplores the downward trajectory of the modern world: "A lot of the time I say anything about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket people will just sort of smile and tell me I'm getting old."(McCarthy, 79) the metaphoric, peculiar expression employed by McCarthy is very significant: the world is going to hell 'in a handbasket', that is, humanity has caused its own downfall. The book thus emphasizes the dark side of the American life, with its extreme corruption and violence.

Bell observes the devotion of people to the American style of life, despite its destructive effect on their lives: "You can say that the country is just a country, it don't actively do nothin.. This country will kill you in a heartbeat and still people love it."(McCarthy, 103) Drug dealing is here at the centre of the plot, standing as a metaphor for the absolute corruption associated with modern life.

In Bell's musings, narcotics appear as a symbol of evil, something that permeates the structure of the modern world: "If you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics."(McCarthy, 121) the world has distanced itself from old time morality, and people have given in to the direst sins.

Notably, the novel emphasizes space or location by describing the world as a generally corrupted country, a barren scene from which old morality has completely vanished. This is thus a profoundly existentialist theme, stressing the terror experienced by the individual in the modern, alienated world. The emphasis on territory is certainly a hint to the traditional and symbolic opposition between heaven and hell as the extreme polarities of good and evil respectively. The negation in the title, 'no country', also evidences the dominance of evil over the modern world.

Evil has taken up all of the space available, and there is no room for goodness and benevolence in an universe where money and material benefits hold sway.

In his review of No Country for Old Men, Benjamin Strong argues that the tragedy of modern world consists precisely in its denial of the atavistic savagery that rules it from within: "The tragedy of American life in No Country for Old Men [...] is not that we fail in our attempts at compassion, but that we are in denial of our atavistic savagery."(Strong, 32) Thus, the very plot of the novel translates the idea of the modern corruption that creates a hellish vacuum in which everyone and everything is slowly swept in.

Thus, although an unrighteous and moral man, Moss gives in to his temptation and takes the 2.4 million dollars he finds, despite the fact that he knows his choice is definitive and does not leave room for a comeback: "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."(McCarthy, 144) Thus, McCarthy showcases the way in which humanity can make wrong steps in the wrong direction. With only one wrong step, the good in the world can progressively dwindle until a state of unbalance is reached.

According to Bell, any slip, even a banal one such as the overlooking of bad manners will lead to an inevitable downfall: "It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners. Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight."(McCarthy, 178) Thus, it is not only the evil doings as such which bring modernity is a helpless and desperate state, but the deliberate ignoring or denial of evil.

The modern world is so used to violence and evil that it fails to recognize them as wrong or to distinguish between good and bad.

As critic Kim Walter proposes, McCarthy thus portrays modernity as a culmination of evil, the result of a long and inevitable landslide which begins with a seemingly insignificant event such as the kicking of a pebble: "It is a landslide of evil stirred by one kicked pebble that won't let up until the Second Coming."(Walter, 9) the religious and transcendental undertones of the text are thus evident. The falling night and the impending darkness are symbolic metaphors for the apocalyptic doom that seems to await humanity.

In this general state of corruption, Sheriff Bell appears as a displaced character that cannot fit in. As any good character in a corrupted world, Bell has a great burden on his shoulders, as he is tempted to try saving the others from their own failings and from giving in to corruption. The world constructed by McCarthy thus appears as an entrapment for the modern man, which not only encloses him tightly but also blinds him to anything else.

As McCarthy points out, even if somebody was in an unknown place and couldn't tell the precise location, the real unknown thing would be where 'somplace else' was: "Suppose you was someplace that you didn't know where it was. The real thing you wouldn't know was where somplace else was.. It wouldn't change nothin about where you was at."(McCarthy, 111) This statement translates as the idea that the modern world functions like a tight, surrounding shell: the only reality known by the individual or something that cannot possibly be transcended.

Going to another place would imply moving there without taking anything along from the current world: "It's about thinkin you got there without taking anything with you."(McCarthy, 205) Under the pressure of the modern world,.