Summary
The novel begins with a first-person account from a border-town sheriff talking about the one and only person he ever sends to the gas chamber for execution. He recalls the boy feeling no remorse for murdering his fourteen-year-old girlfriend (he is nineteen at the time) and, in fact, he had been planning to murder someone for a long time coming. The sheriff visits the boy three times before his execution, the third time on the day of his execution, and he never indicates a shred of remorse. The boy claims that he knows he's going to hell and that he has no soul, and this unsettles the sheriff deeply. The sheriff says that in all his years of policing, he's never met anyone like this boy; he suggests that perhaps this boy is "some new kind" of person. Having said all that, the sheriff then says this boy is "nothin compared to what was comin down the pike" (3). Thus begins the story of No Country for Old Men.
The next chapter begins with a scene in which a man named Chigurh stands handcuffed in a small deputy outpost. A deputy speaks on the phone to the sheriff, describing the items he's confiscated from this man, Chigurh. When Chigurh is arrested, he has in his possession a cattle prod and a pneumatic hose attached to a compressed air tank. As the deputy speaks to the sheriff on the phone, Chigurh expertly shuffles his manacled wrists under his feet, thus putting his hands in front of him instead of behind him. Then, when the deputy hangs up the phone, Chigurh strangles him with the chain of the cuffs. McCarthy describes the strangulation in gruesome, gory detail. Chigurh unlocks his cuffs, washes his bloody wrists, collects his possessions, and drives the deputy's cruiser up the road.
When he reaches the interstate, he uses the siren to pull over the driver of a Ford sedan. He asks the driver to step out of the car, and he does, because of the authority granted to Chigurh by the police cruiser. But the man realizes, looking at Chigurh, that he may not actually be a police officer. By the time he realizes this, it's already too late. Chigurh has the tip of his pneumatic hose pressed on the man's forehead. He pumps a shot of compressed air into the driver, who falls dead onto the road. Chigurh takes his car and leaves the police cruiser behind.
The narration then shifts to the perspective of Llewelyn Moss, who is out alone, hunting in the Texas desert right on the border to Mexico, shooting at antelope across a barren, volcanic landscape. He lines up his shot meticulously, but the wind blows his bullet slightly off track and he only wounds the antelope. He leaves his perch to try and track the animal and ends up walking deep into a tucked away tract of desert land. Stepping up on a ridge, he observes a grisly scene. Several abandoned jeeps and trucks form a wide circle in the sand, and among them are the bullet-riddled bodies of men armed with machine guns. Moss inspects the scene, gun drawn, and finds that all the men are dead except for one, who sits in the front seat of one of the vehicles, shot and barely alive. He's begging for water, but Moss has none. Moss collects a small arsenal of high powered weapons while he stalks the scene, staying on his gaurd.
Moss walks through the scene of the massacre and over a gravelly ridge where he spots the bloody tracks of a wounded man. The tracks lead him to the body of what he believes to be a government agent of some sort. The dead man has a briefcase on his person. Moss takes the briefcase, knowing already what he would find in it. It contains roughly two-and-a-half million dollars. He gets in his truck and drives home with the case and the guns.
When he arrives at his house, his finds his partner waiting for him on the couch. She asks where he's been and whether he spent money on the pistol he's holding. He assures her he didn't. He says he just found it. She doesn't believe him. Moss dismisses her questions and plays off the whole situation as if nothing happened. They go to bed, but Moss can't sleep. He's thinking of the man begging for water. So he dresses and fills a jug of water, the whole time thinking to himself that returning to this scene is the stupidest thing he could ever do.
He drives out to his hunting spot and parks his truck a ways up the road. When he returns to the scene, he finds it changed. Car doors are opened that weren't opened before. And the man who was begging for water has been shot in the head. Fresh blood pools beside the open car door. Moss realizes immediately that he's in grave danger. He hurries to cover. He knows that whoever returned to this scene is looking for their money. On the ridge overlooking the scene he sees headlights from a powerful truck. He tries to flank them, but when he's in view of his truck, he sees that they've already found it and they are standing beside it. He manages to evade them for a while, but eventually they see him and so he dives into the river, which carries him about a mile downstream. When he emerges from the water, he catches a buckshot in his arm. It doesn't go deep, so he applies a tourniquet and carries on, soaked in freezing water, as the light of morning peeks over the desert. He realizes that these men, at the first opportunity, will look up who owns his truck, and when they identify him, everyone he cares about will be in danger. With that in mind, he begins the long walk home.
Part II begins with another first-hand account from the sheriff. He talks about the dangers of being a law enforcement agent and the uncertainty one faces when one pulls a vehicle over. He says, "you dont know what all you’re stoppin when you do stop somebody" (39), referring to a time when he stopped a truck and before he could get out of his cruiser one of the truck's passengers started open firing on him. He then refers to a story he read in the newspaper about two young men who met each other on the road and then set out killing people together. He refers to another story of a woman who put her baby in a trash compactor. He ends his account by saying, "My wife wont read the papers no more. She’s probably right. She generally is" (40).
The next section finds Sheriff Bell in his office. He takes a call from a county resident about her cat being stuck in a tree. The next call, based on the sheriff's end of the conversation, is clearly about finding the dead body left by Chigurh on the side of the interstate, along with the abandoned police cruiser. When the sheriff arrives at the scene it's clear that Chigurh has stuffed the body of the innocent driver into the trunk of the police cruiser that he stole. The sheriff then moves on to the substation where Chigurh strangled the young deputy. Another police officer, Lamar, says of Chigurh, "This son of a bitch will never see a day in court. Not if I catch him he wont" (46). According to Lamar, the dead deputy was only twenty-three and newly married.
The perspective shifts back to Llewelyn Moss. He eventually reaches a bus station and takes a bus to his house in Desert Aire. When he returns to his house, Carla Jean makes him a huge breakfast and asks him where he's been. She's been thinking he was dead this whole time, waiting around the house with no word of his whereabouts. He doesn't tell her what's happening, but he instructs her to gather everything she wants to keep, all her prized possessions that she couldn't leave behind, and go to her mother's house in Odessa. He tells her whatever she leaves behind she'll never see again. He tells her that the cash in the briefcase is from a bank robbery he pulled the day before.
Chigurh, meanwhile, continues along the interstate, but it is unclear how far he's traveled from the massacre scene that Llewelyn discovered. He stops at a filling station and walks inside to buy a bag of cashews and pay for a tank of gas. The proprietor asks him how the weather is in Dallas because he notices from something on Chigurh's stolen car that the car is from Dallas. Chigurh intimidates the proprietor with a series of strange, personal questions about what time he goes to bed, and whether he lives in the house behind the station. The proprietor tries to get Chigurh to leave by saying he has to close the store up, but instead Chigurh flips a coin onto the counter and tells the proprietor to "call it." The proprietor hesitates because he wants to know what it is he's wagering, but Chigurh simply tells him he's wagering "everything" (56). Finally, the proprietor calls heads, the coin lands on heads, and Chigurh leaves the store without harming the man.
Chigurh then meets up with two men and travels with them to the scene of the massacre. They inspect Moss's truck and the dead bodies. They're not sure what to make of it all, but it's clear that they are not the only party looking for the cash. Chigurh murders the two men who accompanied him to the scene, shooting each of them in the head.
Analysis
From the very beginning of No Country for Old Men, the themes of good versus evil and divine judgement emerge through the perspective of Sheriff Bell. Though the novel predominantly uses third-personal narration, McCarthy devotes space at the beginning of chapters to Sheriff Bell, whose manner of speaking differs from the diction and grammar of the third-person narration and takes on a regional Texas quality. The sheriff's perspective provides a valuable counterpoint to McCarthy's characteristically spartan, declarative prose. Instead of exactly reporting the characters' actions and the images they encounter which are often gory and gruesome, difficult to behold in their bare representation, Sheriff Bell provides the reader with a reaction to those images and actions, filtered through his anecdotes, aphorisms, and Christian beliefs. Bell discusses hell and evil, souls and Satan, as a way of organizing the chaotic and senseless violence that he's witnessed as an officer of the law; however, he also admits that he thinks the world is changing. In his first account at the very start of the novel, Bell describes a remorseless nineteen-year-old boy who killed a fourteen-year-old girl he was dating. Bell remembers that the boy "said he knew he was goin to hell. Told it to me out of his own mouth. I dont know what to make of that. I surely dont. I thought I’d never seen a person like that and it got me to wonderin if maybe he was some new kind" (3).
Thus the novel, at least from Bell's perspective, introduces Chigurh as possibly being a "new kind" of person, or at least a rare kind of person. The novel raises the question very early on of whether "evil" exists—whether people are predisposed to violence and are thus agents of "evil." The reader may wonder if Chigurh is even capable of feeling emotion, or being vulnerable in any way. Perhaps he has the emotional capability of a cactus, and life, for Chigurh, is simply about staying alive. The one thing that motivates Chigurh is finding this suitcase full of money. At this point, the reader cannot know whether he is motivated by greed or duty. What is clear is McCarthy's interest in exploring how money motivates people, what people are willing to do for money, and the consequences of having or not having money. For example, when Moss finds the case of money, McCarthy describes his thought process: "He didnt know what it added up to but he had a pretty good idea. He sat there looking at it and then he closed the flap and sat with his head down. His whole life was sitting there in front of him. Day after day from dawn till dark until he was dead. All of it cooked down into forty pounds of paper in a satchel" (18). This passage demonstrates how for a man like Moss, that amount of money could sustain him for the rest of his life. It is both a wildly lifechanging amount of money, and something that he never expected, desired, or had an ambition to attain before the moment he finds it in the desert completely by chance. McCarthy portrays Moss as a careful, considerate man who lives simply and within his means. His sudden possession of two million dollars presents a quandary for Moss. He thinks of the sum of money as "his whole life," but at the same time, his simple, ordered way of living demonstrates that such an excess of money isn't necessary to live one's whole life.
Moss takes the money home, and that could've been the end of it, but his conscience tugs at him and causes him to return to the scene to give the thirsty dying man a jug of water. The fact that Moss gives up his chances of living the rest of his life with this untraceable case of cash for the sake of a small act of kindness for a man that he knows is likely to die anyways suggests many things about Moss's character and about the novel as a whole. For one, Moss knows that he's engaging in self-destructive behavior. When he's readying himself to return to the scene of the massacre, he repeatedly calls himself a fool. He knows he's being reckless. When he realizes at the scene of the massacre that he's been made, he says, "There is no description of a fool ... that you fail to satisfy. Now you’re goin to die" (27-28). And yet, he acts, despite knowing that by acting, he dooms himself. Moss prioritizes doing what he thinks is right; however, in so doing, he endangers everyone he loves. At the end of the day, Moss would have been much better off if he had never discovered a briefcase full of cash. The situation Moss finds himself in suggests that the possession of excess wealth is directly at odds with the notion of doing the right thing and caring for others.
Later on, after Bell talks to someone on the phone about their cat up in a tree, he says, "It’s money ... You have enough money you dont have to talk to people about cats in trees." He immediately follows this thought with, "Well. Maybe you do" (41). This little scene reiterates the conflicting idea that money seems like it would solve everything, followed by the sneaking suspicion that maybe it solves nothing.
