The story follows the journey of three characters caught in a tangled pursuit of one another across this burgeoning wasteland: Llewyn Moss, the everyday man responsible for stealing the money that kicks the plot in motion Anton Chigurh, the philosophical, psychopathic hitman chasing Moss across the desert and Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, the aging Sheriff searching for both men and painfully aware of the declining moral tide plaguing his small county of Terrell, Texas and rapidly spreading out across the nation.

Set near the Texas/Mexico border in 1980, No Country for Old Men instead presents a barren, brutal landscape where the morals and identity of a nation are at a crossroads. This fabled Byzantium representing a paradise-an immaterial realm of wisdom and eternity-separated from the deteriorating quality of life found in the material world.īut the country of McCarthy’s story is no paradise. The man combats these fears by sailing to the shores of Byzantium, where he hopes that the wise sages from ages past may transcend his soul into the fire of immortality. As detailed in four stanzas, Yeats’ poem addresses man’s mortality: describing a man’s anxieties over his approaching age and encroaching death. So begins the Yeats poem from which Cormac McCarthy’s novel- No Country for Old Men-takes its name. Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder singĪnd therefore I have sailed the seas and come

The salmon‐falls, the mackerel‐crowded seas,įish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long – Those dying generations – at their song, In one another’s arms, birds in the trees

No country for old men novel