No Country for Old Men Summary

In 1980, Llewelyn Moss is hunting antelope near the Rio Grande when he comes upon a scene of catastrophic violence: multiple trucks, multiple dead men, a large quantity of heroin, and — some distance away, propped against a tree — a man still barely alive who asks Moss for water before dying. Nearby is a case containing two million dollars in cash. Moss takes it home.

He knows this is a mistake. That night, unable to sleep, he returns to the scene with water for the dying man — and finds it already occupied by new arrivals looking for the money. He flees. This decision — to go back — is the novel's hinge, though McCarthy does not editorialize about it. Moss knows he is now in a situation that will not end cleanly.

Anton Chigurh has been hired to recover the money. He is introduced at the novel's opening escaping from police custody with his bare hands and the handcuffs he was wearing. He travels in Moss's wake, killing systematically and without apparent agitation. He has a cattle gun — a captive bolt pistol normally used for slaughtering livestock — which he uses when he wants to kill quietly. He has a code: some people he kills because he has been paid to, some because they have seen him, and some because of a coin toss he offers them. If you call the toss correctly, you live. If not, he does what he came to do. The coin, he explains, has arrived at this moment through every decision and event that preceded it. The toss is not his choice; it is the culmination of yours.

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell has been the county sheriff for longer than he can remember. He is not a young man. He pursues Chigurh without much expectation of catching him, and his monologues at the opening of each chapter reveal a man who is trying to make sense of a violence that he cannot place in any framework he was given. His grandfather was a sheriff too, and his father. The world he policed in their time is not the world he is policing now.

Moss moves his wife Carla Jean to her mother's house and attempts to stay ahead of Chigurh, crossing the border into Mexico, making deals, calling his wife from payphones. Chigurh follows the transponder hidden in the money case with methodical patience. He kills everyone who gets in the way. He also kills some people who don't.

The chase crosses Texas and into Mexico and back. Moss is resourceful and tougher than his circumstances suggest he should be. He survives multiple confrontations, including a firefight that lands him in a Mexican hospital. But he cannot keep the money, stay alive, and protect Carla Jean simultaneously, and the novel's architecture — which refuses to give the reader a protagonist's triumph — moves toward an outcome that is neither satisfying nor arbitrary.

The novel's most discussed feature is what McCarthy does not show: several of the story's most significant violent events happen off-page, between chapters, and are reported obliquely afterward. McCarthy is interested in aftermath rather than action. Bell arrives at every scene after it has already happened. He is, the novel suggests, always too late — not because he is slow, but because the world has moved somewhere he cannot follow.

Cormac McCarthy's prose in No Country for Old Men is spare, precise, and without a wasted word.

"You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from."

"You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it's made out of. Nothin else."

"The point is there ain't no point."