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Every human finds himself making choices which sometimes seem mundane, but human

life has evolved from basic survival decisions, such as, “should I eat today” to deeper

philosophical assessments like existence. A person might question: do I work to buy food for

myself, or do I rob a convenient store? Do I ignore the person who is making me angry, or do I

lash out and hurt him? Asking these questions is what makes us complex beings. We suffer the

conflict of constantly trying to be a good person and living the way society deems acceptable,

but does this even matter? We are constantly asking ourselves the question, why do bad things

happen to good people?

Through these choices, people can be labeled as a nihilist or a moralist, which is what

McCarthy explores in many of his novels. Many of his nihilistic characters believe that life is meaningless and without purpose, and he always contrasts his nihilistic characters with a moralist, who believes in following the perceived morals of society as well as enforcing them.

Just like contemporary society, the nihilists are often dangerous, while the moralist is often the victim or struggling to live with and understand the former.

McCarthy expands on the concept of nihilism versus morality, and which of these is more powerful in life. One thing remains true throughout all of his novels: “men share an innate violence” (Marche 1). We come to realize that these nihilists create their own set of rules and principles to live by, and the moralists cannot fully understand that concept. Basic life questions such as, who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, are addressed in his novels, but the reader understands that McCarthy is not just talking about his characters in these terms; he is talking about humanity and he is talking about us, the readers. Page | 2

In McCarthy’s novel, No Country for Old Men, (NCFOM), he provides three distinct characters. Anton Chigurh is the nihilistic, psychopathic killer, whose weapon of choice is a captive bolt pistol, commonly used to stun cows unconscious before slaughter. The counter- character to Chigurh is the moralistic World War II veteran, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell who fruitlessly tries to capture Chigurh. Lastly, McCarthy adds another character to this story that provides a middle ground from the former two characters. Carson Wells is a hit man hired to kill Chigurh and retrieve the stolen money that Chigurh is hunting. Wells cannot survive in the nihilistic world or remain faithful to the moralistic world. These three characters provide insight into

McCarthy’s own beliefs about the struggle between nihilism and morality in the world. It is an ongoing struggle between good and evil, and no middle man is going to be able to rationalize the conflict because the middle way is repeatedly destroyed or undermined as the novel unfolds.

Anton Chigurh is aptly described as satanic throughout NCFOM, and the reader agrees with this characterization as more of a caricature of evil than a complex individual (Cooper 43), but Chigurh plays a large prophetical role in this novel. He provides a certain philosophical experience for the reader as well as for Sheriff Bell. He sees the world become so nihilistic in nature that he cannot simply explain anything without despising the world and the men in it.

Luckily, Sheriff Bell has an interpreter, and he just so happens to be nihilism personified:

Chigurh.

In one of his monologues Bell says, “I think if you were Satan and you were settin around

tryin to think up something that would bring the human race to its knees what you would

probably come up with is narcotics. I told that to somebody at breakfast the other mornin and

they asked me if I believed in Satan. I said Well that aint the point. And they said I know but do Page | 3

you? I had to think about that. I guess as a boy I did. Come the middle years my belief I reckon

had waned somewhat. Now I’m startin to lean back the other way. He explains a lot of things that otherwise don’t have no explanation. Or to me they don’t” (NCFOM 218). Bell’s pessimistic conclusion about the world is triggered by the evil substances that humanity provides: drugs, murder, wrong-doings, etc, but McCarthy implies the only way to understand evil is to fully encompass evil. Chigurh is Bell’s way of trying to comprehend nihilism, but Chigurh makes it even more difficult because he does have a set of principles, albeit these principles do not adhere to the accepted principles of morality in society. The principles to which Chigurh commits himself are more ad hoc and transitory. Chigurh makes “arbitrary promises” such as a victim’s life depending on a coin toss (Cooper 48).

“You need to call it, Chigurh said. I can’t call it for you. It wouldn’t be fair. It wouldn’t even be right. Just call it.”

“I didn’t put nothing up.” [Convenience store clerk]

“Yes you did. You’ve been putting it up your whole life. You just didn’t know it”

(NFOM 56).

Chigurh has rules and is a “terrifying character primarily because he does not seem to kill out of malice. Rather, as Wells points out, he ‘has principles;” (Cooper 48). “Chigurh forces each victim into a prescribed conversation before destroying him. He asks them if they understand the role he plays, and he corrects their answers by telling them that he is God-like and devil-like”

(Cooper 49). The French critic and social theorist, Rene Girard has coined the term “the function of sacrifice” which states that “violence will only come to an end only after it has had the last Page | 4

word and that last word has been accepted as divine” (Parrish 66). For example, there is a subplot in the novel where Llewellyn Moss finds the suitcase of money that Chigurh is eventually hired to retrieve. Chigurh tracks down Moss and tells him that he has the option to return the money and his wife will not die, or not return the money and suffer his wife’s death as well as his own. Girard says that the function of sacrifice requires “not only a surrogate victim, but more importantly, violent unanimity.” This doubled violence leads a nihilist to “prevent murder with murder, in a symbolic slaying or sacrifice” (Parrish 66). Chigurh finds Moss’s wife because he dies without giving Chigurh the money, and questions, “You gave your word to my husband to kill me?” She adds, “He’s dead. My husband is dead. Nothing can change that.” But he replies, “Your husband, you may be distressed to learn, had the opportunity to remove you from harm’s way and he chose not to do so. He was given that option and his answer was no.

Otherwise I would not be here now” (NCFOM 255-256). Chigurh was willing to kill Moss and forego his wife’s murder, but instead Moss was killed instead by Mexican drug lords to whom the money belonged to, and the money had not been retrieved by Chigurh. Since Chigurh could not prevent one sacrifice with another, the only logical action in his nihilistic calculus is to stay true to his principle and kill Moss’s wife.

Chigurh ends his killing spree in NCFOM by saying, “When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way. You’re asking that I second say the world. Do you see? (NCFOM 260). He cannot understand a world that is not nihilistic. He believes that the world is the way it is, and it can be no other way. Page | 5

When there is a nihilistic world, there are always people who want morality to exist. The question they face is a question of power. Is good powerful enough to conquer evil? McCarthy argues this point with Sheriff Ed Tom Bell’s character. “Bell’s voice offers a metaphysical counterpoint to the nihilistically-inclined narrative events of the world” (Cooper 40). Bell is constantly questioning the world around him. “Here last week they found this couple out in

California they would rent out rooms to old people and kill em and bury em in the yard and cash their social security checks. They’d torture em first, I don’t know why. Maybe their television was broke. Now here’s what the papers had to say about that. I quote from the papers. Said:

Neighbors were alerted when a man run from the premises wearin only a dogcollar. You can’t make up such a thing as that. I dare you even try” (124). His mind cannot fathom certain perverse events that happen in the world, and he dares us as readers to even try to think of something more gruesome than that. Unlike Chigurh, who follows “an archaic code of destruction and annihilation, Bell is haunted by prophetic visions of hope, looks into the future and the past in order to construct a sense, however elusive, of transcendence” (Cooper 49).

In a scene in the Coen Brothers Film, No Country for Old Men, Sheriff Bell visits his uncle Ellis, and they have a long talk about forgiveness, the past, and the future. At one point

Bell asks his uncle, “That man that shot you died in prison?” His uncle replies, “Angola, yeah?”

Bell asks, “What’d you do if he’d a been released?” His uncle replies, “Oh I don’t know.

Nothing. Wouldn’t be no point in it.” Bell says, “Kindly surprised to hear you say that,” and his uncle replies, “Well, all the time you spend trying to get back what’s been took from you, more is going out the door. After a while, you have to try to get a tourniquet on it” Page | 6

Bell tries to rationalize Uncle Ellis’s forgiveness of the man who shot him, something that Bell would probably not have been able to do. Uncle Ellis then talks about an event in the past that will help Bell construct a sense of transcendence. “I sent Uncle Mac’s thumbbuster and badge over to the Rangers, put it in their museum. Your daddy ever tell you how Uncle Mac got into his reward? Gunned down on his own porch over in Hudspeth County,” but after Uncle Ellis finishes the story, he adds, “What you got aint nothing new. This country is hard on people. You can’t stop what’s coming. It aint all waiting on you. That’s vanity” (No Country for Old Men).

Sheriff Bell now realizes that the past is the same as the present and will likely be the same as the

future, but the most important aspect of Uncle Ellis’s speech is his contention that the world is

not waiting on him (Sheriff Bell), which can be translated into the philosophical sense that the world is not dependent on morality, and in most cases, morality does not exist.

Carson Wells, a unique character, in the novel tries to walk the tightrope between nihilism and morality. Wells describes Chigurh at one point during the novel, “He’s a

psychopathic killer but so what? There’s plenty of them around” (NCFOM 141). For Wells, “The

inexplicable evil of Chigurh and the equally inexplicable moral code practiced by Sheriff Bell

may merely underscore the pointlessness of any discussion of morality, as Wells seems to

believe” (Cooper 37). When Wells tries to retrieve the money from Moss, he tells him not to

mess with Chigurh because no one ever lives. In fact, he is impressed after he learns that Moss is

still alive after coming in contact with Chigurh. Carson also tries to barter with Chigurh by

agreeing to retrieve the money from Moss with compensation. However, Chigurh tracks down

Moss and mortally shoots him, which concludes that when there is a fight between morality and nihilism, there is no room for a middleman. Page | 7

Cormac McCarthy retrieved his title from the W.B Yeats poem, “Sailing to Byzantium,”

where Yeats writes, “THAT is no country for old men. The young/ In one another’s arms, birds

in the trees/- Those dying generations – at their song… Whatever is begotten, born, and does./

Caught in that sensual music all neglect/Monuments of unageing intellect,” a construct that has

existential meaning in Yeats’s meditation. The ancient city of Byzantium contrasts with the

“artlessness and ugliness of the drug war on the border of Texas and Mexico” (Greenwood 72)

where the novel No Country for Old Men takes place. Yet, the speaker of the poem and Sheriff

Bell share the way they face old age. They are heroic in their endeavor and struggle with the

concept of morality.

In McCarthy’s book, The Sunset Limited: A Novel in Dramatic Form, published one year

after No Country for Old Men, dramatizes the philosophies of the earlier book. The drama is

about an atheist college professor (White), who tries to jump in front of a train and is saved by an

Evangelical Christian ex-convict (Black). Black brings White to his apartment and they discuss

morality, life, religion, God, and human suffering. No Country For Old Men has “nihilism

(represented by Chigurh) and morality (represented by Bell), defend their cases against each other, just as in the play, nihilism (represented by White) verbally contends with morality

(represented by Black)” (Cooper 39).

McCarthy explores nihilism in a different way with White then he did with Chigurh.

White does not wait to hurt other people the way Chigurh did; he only wants to hurt himself, but he does not believe there is any good in the world, which leads him to want to die. White then says, “Well, here’s my news, Reverend. I yearn for darkness. I pray for death. Real death. If I thought that in death I would meet the people I’ve known in life I don’t know what I’d do. That Page | 8

would be the ultimate horror. The ultimate despair. If I had to meet my mother again and start all that all over, only this time without the prospect of death to look forward to? Well. That would be the final nightmare (The Sunset Limited 135). White does not see the benefits of life, and only looks forward to death. Black cannot understand this statement and asks White, “Mm. If I’m understandin you right you sayin that everybody that aint just eat up with the dumb-ass ought to be suicidal” (136). Yet, White sounds dramatically like Chigurh in his statement, “If people saw the world for what it truly is. Saw their lives for what they truly are. Without dreams or illusions.

I don’t believe they could offer the first reasons why they should not elect to die as soon as possible (136-137). The nihilist does not have time for dreams, and the nihilist creates a new set of principals and goals to live (or die) for. Chigurh tries to explain to Moss’s wife in “NCFOM”

“They are not some other way. They are this way. You’re asking I second say the world. Do you see?” (NCFOM 260). In this drama, White is trying to explain that principle to Black. People need to see their lives for what they truly are in order to understand the world. According to both

Chigurh and White, people are trying to focus on why bad things happen to them, when they could try to understand that it is just the way life goes.

Both The Sunset Limited and No Country for Old Men end with “the nihilist exiting the stage while the moralist remains, diffident and undefended (Cooper 39). This represents

McCarthy’s inability to fully lean towards a definite decisions of whether morality or nihilism is more powerful. The Sunset Limited ends with suicidal White ignoring Black’s advice and kind words. White says, “No there is only the hope of nothingness. I cling to that hope. Now open the door” (The Sunset Limited 141). Black reluctantly opens the door and falls to his knees in the doorway saying to himself, “He didn’t mean them words. You know he didnt. I dont understand what you send me down there for. I dont understand it. If you wanted me to help him how come Page | 9

you didnt give me the words? You give em to him. What about me?” (143). Black understands

White’s problem, but lacks an adequate response to the nihilistic viewpoint. Instead he is left alone trying to contemplate White’s speech. In No Country for Old Men, we see the same type of scenario. Chigurh remains uncaught, white Sheriff Bell’s story ends with a horse ride with his wife. They sit under the cottonwoods and watch doves drink from the well as their horses graze, and his wife says, “It’s nice to just be here,” and Bell replies, “Yes mam. It is indeed” (NCFOM

301). Sheriff Bell is quite reserved in his actions and speech, because he has decided to not try to

understand the nihilistic world he lives in anymore, and partially because he cannot understand

this world. Yet, deep down inside of his being, he knows that there is still room for hope in the

world.

In McCarthy’s novel Child of God, he examines the nature of evil and human sinfulness

as expressed through moral depravity and the grotesque violation of social taboos (Greenwood

39). The character of Lester Ballard is a social outcast who becomes a deranged serial killer and

necropheliac. McCarthy explores nihilism in this novel by not including any moral character to

coincide in this world. It is just Lester and his gruesome deeds inhabiting a seemingly moralistic

world. “The picture of Ballard that emerges from the narrative as a whole is of a man who both

rejects and has been rejected by contemporary society (Greenwood 40. Although Lester Ballard

becomes a lunatic in the end of the novel, spending the rest of his life in an insane asylum, as

readers we can still relate to his plight, however perverse it is. McCarthy has created a true anti-

hero who is at odds with society (Greenwood 41). It is the society with whom we decide to

deject, not the nihilism of Lester Ballard. Early in the novel, the narrator calls him “a child of

God much like yourself perhaps” (4), a comment implying that “inasmuch as Lester shares our

humanity, we all share at least a potential for his otherwise inexplicable perversity” (Jarrett 36). Page | 10

There should be no question as to why the McCarthy put that concept on page so early in the novel: we as readers need to be conscious of the presence of God and find solidarity with

Ballard. McCarthy ingeniously has his readers reject a moral society for a nihilistic character because we share an empathy with him.

The novel, Outer Dark, share another converse pair of characters: Culla and Rinthy

Holme. Rinthy becomes pregnant by her brother and once the child is born, Culla brings the infant to the middle of the woods and gives it to a tinker. The story is told by both Culla and

Rinthy and the journey both of them experience separately as Rinthy tries to find her baby and

Culla tries to run away from the deeds he has committed. Rinthy is the moral character while

Culla is clearly the nihilistic character, and people interact with them differently depending on their philosophical association.

Rinthy, the moralist, is searching for her child despite her post-labor condition. McCarthy asserts his previous attitude towards moralism as Rinthy opens the door to a store she “entered, diffident, almost disdainful, as if sore put upon to take her trade to such a place” (54). She asks the storekeeper for a jar of water, and the storekeeper says, “Get all ye want. Just set it back when you’re done” (55). Rinthy asks the store clerk “What do I owe ye?” Seeing Rinthy’s needy, but positive and moralistic attitude, the storekeeper says, “That’s all right” (55). By contrast,

Culla is forced to run from the people he meets on his journey to avoid being beaten and murdered for stealing. Even the landscape is hostile to Culla. “He came down out of the kept land and into a sunless wood where the road curved dark and cool, overlaid with immense ferns, trees hung with grey moss like a hag’s hair… “(117). There is a stark resistance to nihilism within the realm of the novel, not only with the landscape, but also with the characters. Page | 11

Like Sheriff Bell’s description of Chigurh in NCFOM, Culla is also depicted as a

nihilistic devil. For example, during Culla’s travels when he stops at an old man’s cabin and asks

for a drink of water, the old man responds, “Wouldn’t turn Satan away for a drink” (117). Culla

and the old man converse, and as Culla departs the old man reasserts, “Shoo, I wouldn’t turn

Satan away for a drink” (127). The pity extended to Rinthy is duplicated by an old man who accurately labels Culla as Satan.

More importantly, McCarthy explores the option of nihilism facing nihilism in Outer

Dark. A band of outlaws follow Culla and they eventually meet with each other and talk. This band of outlaws consists of a patriarchal figure, an oldest son, and a mentally disabled son. The last member of the band is Culla’s own abandoned son who is dressed in rags, and burnt on one side of his face. The “child suffers the punishment for Culla and Rinthy’s incest. Furthermore,

the outlaw’s murder of Culla’s child actively achieves the death that Culla himself has sought

near the novel’s opening when he abandons the child in the woods” (Jarrett 17). Culla is forced

to come face to face with the murder and nihilistic behavior, but does not react in a way that in

nihilistic. Instead, the novel ends with Culla speaking to a blind man about the meaning of

prayer. He learns that, “men cannot confront the naked truth of their own violence without

abandoning themselves” (Parish 66). When a nihilist is faced with other nihilism, he becomes

diffident.

McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Road, is laden with biblical allusions,

themes, and scenarios, yet there is one theme placed in this novel that the bible completely

represents, and that is the theme of nihilism versus morality. A father and son’s struggle to Page | 12

survive in a post-apocalyptic world is the literary playground for the struggle between the moralists and nihilists.

Starting the novel with an “allusion to the conclusion of Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming,’”

(Grindley 12) McCarthy sets the stage for one of the worst scenarios for the human race. This

father and son fellowship meets with nihilistic people trying to also survive in this barren

wasteland. They are witnesses to a man getting struck by lightning, rapists, murderers, slave

holders farming women for breeding, suicide, and a completely desolate landscape. These two

people are living in the epitome of a nihilistic world, and again, the moralistic character leaves

the scene diffident and despondent like the rest of McCarthy’s protagonists.

“The Road is the… story of a faithless father who refuses to sacrifice his son on an altar

built by his own atheism (Grindley 13), and his refusal is what causes the father’s death. The son,

the true protagonist, acts as his father’s “personal savior,” kneels over his father’s body and says,

“I wont forget. No matter what” (286). McCarthy ends the novel with a large sense of

hopelessness that can be attributed to being subjected to the nihilistic world, but like Sheriff Bell

“even in the face of mankind’s most abject mistakes, there is always hope; always a small flicker

of spirit, which while it still burns means that life can go on” (Allen 28). Although, this life is not

the life most people would want to experience, humans learn to adapt to their surroundings and

try to live to their full potential.

The world is a chaotic and turbulent place that results in humanity trying to cope with the

unpredictable settings in which they reside. Cormac McCarthy addresses the struggle of nihilism

and morality in his novels, but explores different scenarios of the struggle. No Country for Old

Men contains two characters representing moralism and nihilism, but the nihilist focuses his Page | 13

aggression on the people and world around him. In The Sunset Limited, the nihilist places his aggression on himself. The novel, Child of God, makes the reader a nihilist by relating to the nihilistic character, and the anti-hero of the novel. McCarthy explores nihilism versus nihilism in

Outer Dark, and in The Road, his characters must survive in a completely nihilistic world.

Although these scenarios are different, every moralist character leaves the novel with a sense of hesitancy towards the world while the nihilist is left untouched or unchanged. Whether or not

McCarthy uses his characters to provide commentary on the contemporary world, or just uses them to persuade readers to open their minds to what exactly is nihilistic and what is moral, he delivers characters and settings that are sometimes too real and frightening to contemplate. He challenges his readers to accept the notion that our seemingly moralistic minds may just be as perverse as many of his characters, and gives us the challenge to really try to determine the line between morality and nihilism. We may be surprised with the revelation that sometimes the line is quite blurred.

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Works Cited

Allen, Daniel. “The Road.” Nursing Standard. 23.15-17 (2008): 1-7. Parrish, Tim. “The Killer Wears the Halo: Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O’Conner, and The American Religion.” Modern Critical Views: Cormac McCarthy. Bloom, Harold, ed. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2002. Cooper, Lydia. “He’s a Psychopathic Killer, but so What?: Folklore and Morality in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men.” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature. 45.1 (2009): 37-59. Greenwood, Willard P. Reading Cormac McCarthy. Santa Barbara: Greenwood Press, 2009. Grindley, Carl James. “The Setting of McCarthy’s The Road.” Explicator. 67.1 (2008): 11-13. Jarrett, Robert L. Cormac McCarthy. London: Twayne Publishers, 1997. Marche, Stephen. “Are Things Getting a Little Violent?” Esquire. 150.2 (2008): 38-39. McCarthy, Cormac. Outer Dark. New York: Vintage International, 1968. McCarthy, Cormac. Child of God. New York: Vintage International, 1973. McCarthy, Cormac. No Country for Old Men. New York: Vintage International, 2005. McCarthy, Cormac. The Sunset Limited: a Novel in Dramatic Form. New York: Vintage International, 2006. McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage International, 2006. Page | 15

Yeats, William. “Sailing to Byzantium.” The Literature Network. Jalic Inc, Web. 22 Nov 2009. http://www.online-literature.com/yeats/781/ Dir. The Coen Brothers. No Country for Old Men. Perf. Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem. Paramount Vantage, 2008.