No Country For Old Men By Cormac Mccarthy

The Illusion of Free Will in the Reality of Fate Decisions and consequences should stem from free will; however, free will only leads one towards their inevitable fate. In the novel No Country For Old Men, written by Cormac McCarthy, characters are set on a seemingly impossible course to escape or change. Nevertheless, McCarthy uses characters like Llewelyn Moss to convey that everyone makes decisions and creates their course. Controversially, through the monologues of Anton Chigurh, the audience is set to believe that everyone has a destiny or fate they will reach, and everything that happens is a part of the journey to one’s unavoidable fate. McCarthy examines how the illusion of free will challenges fate and its inevitability through Moss’s

Chigurh puts his faith in the unexplainable power of fate, and he does so through measures he cannot control, like a coin toss. When he goes to a gas station and is confronted by the gas clerk, he begins to drill the clerk with questions. Eventually, he simply flips a coin and demands that the clerk call it. Chigurh does not control the coin; there is no trick to the action. As the clerk questions why he should do so and says that he “didn’t put anything up,” Chigurh tells him, “You’ve been putting it up your whole life” (56). Chigurh refers to every decision the clerk made that led him to this moment. Similar to how the coin had “been traveling twenty-two years to get here” (56). Even the fate of the coin led it to that exact moment. Luckily for the clerk, he called the coin correctly and narrowly escaped death. He may not have known it, but he is one of the few to survive an encounter with Chigurh: "There’s no one alive on this planet that’s ever had even a word with

This decision was out of free will, and Moss believes he can control the consequences of this action as he trusts his survival abilities. Moss’s confidence in his choices and belief that he will escape death and the consequences of taking the money is partly due to his acceptance of his situation. Earlier in the novel, after a close encounter with death during his return to the drug deal, Moss understands that “they would never stop looking for him”. Never, as in never” (36). This realization caused Moss to start planning how he would escape death immediately. Despite his best attempts, he still ends up in a series of inevitable and eventually fatal events. In Moss’s discussion with Carson Wells, the man sent to retrieve the drug money, he acts unserious despite Wells’ gruesome description of Chigurh and the harsh reality that Chigurh would never stop hunting him, and without his help, then he’s dead. Moss does not care about these points; Wells does not believe Moss is “cut out for this” (154). Moss responds, “We’ll see, won’t we?” (154). Furthermore, Moss demonstrates how, after his first encounter with Chigurh, he does not go running to the police or even take help from Wells; he relies on himself, saying, “I know how he found