No Country For Old Men Analysis

The Myth of the Better Man. Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men is the story of Sheriff Ed Bell’s attempt to save Llewellyn Moss, a young man who has stolen a suitcase full of cash from the aftermath of a Cartel deal gone bad, and to stop Anton Chigurh, a ruthless hitman sent to retrieve the money and kill Moss. These circumstances are full of danger and blood-soaked in violence, all of which lead to the Sheriff’s mindset on the world: this is “No Country For Old Men” like him.Good men are in the minority and mankind is destined to be villainous. Despite these odds, Bell clings on to a small bit of hope: the good men can still change the world for the better. But does Sheriff Bell’s idea of a good man really exist? Sheriff Bell’s attempt to stop these events is exactly that, an attempt. Throughout the entirety of the story, Bell is one step behind, only hearing of the consequences of Moss and Chigurh’s destructive

As far as he's concerned, nothing could've ever saved the world, especially not him.This world is wicked and forever tainted, nothing can restore it to it's former glory.The last monologue the Sheriff has in the story is of a dream he had after his father died. In this dream he and his father are riding on horseback together in the mountains at night. His father rode ahead of Bell carrying a horn with fire in it. Bell says"he was going on ahead and he was fixin to make afire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold"(pg.309). To Ed, his father represented what a man was supposed to be. When a friend asks Bell what he thinks his father would’ve done in Bell’s situation in the war, Bell says. “He’d of set there till hell froze over and then stayed a while on the ice”(pg.279). It only seems reasonable that a man like his father, someone who he thought was the pinnacle of morality and aspired to be, would save the world and rid it of evil. Something Ed believes he couldn’t do, because he himself wasn’t a good