No Country for Old Men Literary Elements

Novel, neo-Western, Thriller

The events take place not far from the US-Mexico border, in Terrel Country, Texas. The time is the 1980s when cartel violence begins to take a toll on border communities.

The novel is a mix of two types of narration. Some parts are written from the first-person point of view of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell. Most of the narrative is communicated from the third-person point of view of an omniscient narrator.

Tone is tired, hopeless, and disillusioned. The mood of the novel is generally tense and meant to illicit a feeling of suspense in the reader.

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is the protagonist of the story. It is possible to consider Llewelyn Moss to be a second protagonist or deuteragonist. Anton Chigurh is the antagonist.

There are two conflicts. The first one is internal—a man vs. himself. Ed Tom Bell makes a difficult decision to leave his position and admits that he is not able to fulfill his duties. He often thinks about the mistakes of the past, and a strong feeling of guilt tortures him. The second conflict is man vs. man, which is represented by Llewelyn Moss and Anton Chigurh.

Llewelyn’s death is the climax of the story.

Sheriff Bell foreshadows much of the violence and tragedy that takes place at the hands of Anton Chigurh in his short, first-person introductions to each chapter; especially at the beginning, before the reader knows what Chigurh is capable of, Bell discusses the existence of "a true and living prophet of destruction" (4) when trying to make sense of a new, particularly senseless "evil" that he begins to encounter late in his career.

An example of understatement occurs when Llewelyn returns home from the scene of the drug deal gone wrong. When Carla Jean asks him what is in the satchel, he responds, "It's full of money." She replies, "Yeah. That'll be the day" (20). The interaction is understated and also contains dramatic irony, because, when Llewelyn so casually and calmly answers her question, she doesn't actually suspect that there is 2.4 million dollars in the case, but the reader knows that there is.

The novel alludes to several stories from the Bible, most importantly the book of Revelations with the theme of moral decay and the end of a certain familiar way of living and behaving that disappeared in the 1960s.

McCarthy draws on the vast, severe desert landscapes of West Texas, which are portrayed as being as unforgiving as the novel's antagonist, Anton Chigurh.

Chigurh often tells his victims that he has no say in whether they live or die, but they always point out to him that he must pull the trigger in order to kill them. Chigurh's belief that he is simply an agent of the inevitable, but that's a paradox because he always has to make the choice to pull the trigger.

There is a parallel between Ed Tom and Loretta's marriage and Carla Jean and Llewelyn's marriage, which become especially clear when Ed Tom talks to Carla Jean at the diner in Odessa. Carla Jean married young; she was sixteen. Loretta was in her late teens when she married Ed Tom. And both men believe that their relationships with their spouses are a form of salvation for them.

When characters refer to "the law" and "the country," they're gesturing toward the structures of law enforcement and government institutions.