No Country for Old Men as a Psychological Thriller - Essay Example

Rhetorical Analysis of No Country for Old Men as a Psychological Thriller In the novel No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy creates a world that is both familiar and strangely unsettling. The character of a sociopathic killer is not new to readers. There have been sociopaths identified in psychological thrillers throughout the history of the genre. McCarthy specifically works to create an environment of killing through his opening discussion with a soulless teenager to a sheriff, to the practiced skills that leads Chigurh to kill twice early in the novel, and then to the comparison of killers of humans to that of a hunter who calculates with skill how to kill his prey. The idea of killing is familiar to all of the main characters with little to no moral center. The novel is existentialist in its discussion of these crimes, creating no real moral or justice and abandoning the idea of resolution to the existence of the socio-path. He comes and he goes, creating a wake of resolutions when the lives of those he passes are ended. The resolution to his existence is not there, however, which causes many reviewers to take pause. In the Cormac McCarthy novel No Country for Old Men uses symbols of killing, innocence, and a post-apocalyptic idea of morality in which America and the wars of the later 20th century have left people flat and cold, the meaning of life lost in an existential fog. In the opening passage of No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy paints a chilling picture of what it means to be a killer. The main character, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, relates a story of someone he had arrested who had been given the death penalty for a crime that most people thought to be a crime of passion. A nineteen year old boy was dating a fourteen year old girl and had killed her. When he visits, the boy tells him that he had always wanted to kill someone and he had chosen to kill her, not been driven to it by some emotion he could not control. The passage goes on to describe his confession where he admits that he liked the feeling of killing and if he could do it again, he would do it. With this anecdotal tale, McCarthy begins the journey of Bell through a psychological thriller that shifts between soulless men and innocents who do not have a clue about the evil that men will do to each other. The book can be seen as a representation of the gothic Romance thriller with a center of evil through which the rest of the action takes place in psychologically driven tension. Garret calls the moment in which the other characters face the evil in the story as the recognition scene, embedding it into the psychology of evil. In this moment, the benign character sees that they are facing evil and in that moment know their fate which had not been clear to them before this point. One difference that McCarthy places in his work, however, is that the world is relatively flat and without great peaks and valleys of emotion. It is a deconstruction of the metaphysical presence that the character that represents evil, Anton Chigurh, establishes through a lack of thrill despite being a part of what should be a thriller. It is not that the novel does not thrill. What it does not do is feed the reader the emotions associated with the events in the story. Therefore, as Chigurh acts he is even more horrifying because of the dispassionate tone that is related through his series of murders. Before page ten Chigurh has killed to police officers, the first in a struggle after which he calmly does what he needs to in order to quietly escape a police station. The second is even less emotional as he simply steps outside of the car and uses his pressurized air in which to put a hole in the head of the officer. It is clean, precise and practiced. Chigurh is a man with no soul, one very similar to the one that Bell has described after meeting with the boy before his execution – but Chugurh has no emotions about his work and barely registers curiosity at times (McCarthy 1-7). The comparison made between Moss and Chigurh is interesting. The reader meets Llewellyn Moss as he is hunting, his aim, his intentions, and his demeanor cold and without emotion about his task. Easy comparisons can be made between the two characters, although the killer of men is clearly more cold and calculating than Moss. Still the comparison is there and it speaks volumes about the meaning of murder and the act of killing. The detached way in which both men operates creates a normalization between them, Chigurh’s actions taking on a subtle shift in understanding as the reader takes the comparisons into consideration. In creating these rich comparisons and in presenting the information through cold, emotionless prose, the genre of the crime thriller is fulfilled in those moments. This examination of killers to the point that they are compared prepares the reader for the developments that they would expect to see. Jarret points out that Moss’ fate and that of his wife is set because of an act that is not natural and seems out of character. Through leaving behind the wounded man without water and not helping him, Moss has set a course, but when he returns to help the man he has gone against good sense and this is where he is discovered as the man who has taken the money that the other characters in the story are trying to find. Jarret writes “So his return with water to the scene of the shootout to offer a drink to the dying Mexican is largely inexplicable in terms of the realistic narrative” (37). The narrative goes against the nature of what a man would do, leading to a discussion about how the end of the novel also does not follow a resolution based narrative that a psychological thriller needs. The ways in which it aligns with the genre of the psychological thriller is through creating an inexplicable villain. Most modern psychological thrillers do not excuse or denounce the killer, but present him or her as an enigma that is impossible to explain. McCarthy creates Chigurh at this level, someone with no real past or future and no true character arc in which to witness transformation. He is evil incarnate without the passion of the dark. He is not driven by madness and has no moral agenda to fulfill. He stands in the role of killer as easily as he could stand in the role of desk clerk or teacher. He is what he does without remorse and without madness to create a painting of his character that explains why he does what he does. He simply is a killer with barely a curiosity about the people he kills in his trade. Because of the lack of resolution and the way in which the villain, Chigurh, fades into the story and then just fades out, Cooper states that reviewer James Wood wrote that “the novel’s villain, Anton Chigurh, a ‘hollowed’ representation in a ‘morally empty book” (37). The characters in this book are mostly without conflict that needs real resolution and have no character arcs through which to define meaning to their existence. The characters are true representations of an existentialist’s perspective, their lives having very little true meaning and their deaths having even less of an impact on the world. A moral center remains eerily absent, questioning the soul of the narration as much as the souls in the characters. What McCarthy is saying about justice is that it is at the whims of those involved. Justice is not an overriding principle that creates balance in the universe. That Chigurh gets hit by a car after killing Moss’ wife is not a comment on justice because he gets up and disappears with no resolution to the issue of justice. His last interactions are about deception, not even murder, as he convinces two boys to keep the secret of the injuries he has just experienced. Even some of the other commentaries made during the story seem to have no specific morality, just a statement of facts. When Sheriff Bell has the conversation with the older woman and she states that she wants her granddaughter to have an abortion if she wants, Bell comments he thinks she will be able to as much as she will be able to put her, the grandmother, to sleep when needed (McCarthy 197) . The point of a passage such as this is to create an example of the plain talk that is used within the novel to express that there are no great highs or lows on the emotional level. Life moves forward through events rather than making emotional pit stops and stopping to experience what has just happened. The morality of the story can be seen as a morality of meaning in that the meaning of killing is just the removal of someone from the world. Even the nature of the dialogue continues this sense of plain talk. The dialogue is written in long strings with no emotional descriptions to the words and very little that explains the scene as the dialogue takes place. The flattening of the characters works to show how plainness, the common and simple lives of people do not run in long emotive states. People are flat and the novel steps away from the thrill of the psychologically motivated novel in order to express this dynamic. Justice, then, has lost its meaning and is no longer a way in which to examine the world. The reader mourns this loss and looks for a way in which to inject meaning with McCarthy continually taking this away until at the end the reader is spent, longing for a world in which justice will prevail. Unfortunately for the reader this is not the case. The need for a sense of morality is lost with all of the characters acting on their own survival as opposed to a moral center from which to determine their actions. This is why Jarrett feels that the move that Moss makes to go back and help the injured man is out of character. It also shows that it does not pay to act on a moral imperative. Although the sheriff seems to have morality and a sense of justice, his ways revert to the America that was and according to Cooper “his prophetic and visionary monologues frame the tale while remaining ambiguously separate from it” (38). In other words, the story as it progresses from the perspective of modern day American post-apocalyptic morality is balanced against the tales and moralities that are given by Bell. In the end, Jarret describes Chigurh as representation of the end of American morality, an apocalypse of the ideologies of the American spirit in which the death of meaning becomes represented in the absence of meaning in the process of killing (42). The novel creates a journey in which the remnants of the past are firmly placed in the past and the new America which lacks a moral compass or a feeling of justice is at the center of life. Jarret discusses this in relationship to the Vietnam War where both Chigurh and Moss fought, Chigurh in the Special Forces and Moss plainly no hero, only a man who survived. He is not so lucky this time and his death shreds what remains of the American innocence where moral redemption could be purchased through a sip of water. Jarret writes that it is his innocence that sends Moss back to offer a drink to a dying man when he had already committed the theft of the money making him a target. His actions could not buy him redemption, but instead drew the attention of evil. McCarthy’s novel is a sparse telling of a story in which the expectations of resolution that come from a psychological thriller go unfulfilled. The character of Chugurh provides for a cold reality, his actions calculated, skilled, and without regard to human consequences. His mission is his only concern. One can relate this to a wide number of social ills, but in the end Chugurh does what he does and there is no real meaning to his actions. McCarthy uses many of the psychological thriller structures, but he dissects them and uses their bare bones in order to write a novel that is and is not within that genre. He finds that no justice is a reflection of reality and that a lack of morality as a guiding principle reflects the world in the late 20th century. Works Cited Cooper, Laura. “He’s a psychopathic killer but so what?: Folklore and morality in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men” in author, ed. Name of book. Place of Publication, Publisher, Date of publication. Print. Jarret, Robert. “Genre, voice, and ethos: McCarthy’s Perverse Thriller”. The Cormac McCarthy Journal. 5.1, 36-45, Spring 2005. Print. In an article that discusses the novel No Country for Old Men, Jarret discusses the nature of the genre as it is used by McCarthy, presenting ways in which the story has deconstructed the psychological thriller and left it bare and without a morality attached. The author discusses a series of different types of genre specific elements and how they are used by McCarthy. As an example, he talks about the way in which ‘the revelation of evil’ impacts various characters, but on the whole is slightly different in this book than in others that share the same genre. Through examining the philosophical undertones of the novel, Jarret dissects in relationship to the genre and determines that it is representational of a world in which meaning has been lost. McCarthy, Cormac. No Country for Old Men. New York: Vintage International, 2006. Print. Read More