Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men Essay

Good and evil have existed since the beginning of mankind. Good defends the righteous, as evil has been bent on destruction. In today’s society, many people believe that good will always triumph over evil. The murderer will eventually be caught by the police; the carjacker will one day meet his doom; the superhero will defeat the evil villain. Simply, in some circumstances, this is not entirely true. Good does not always prevail over evil. This is exceptionally true in the movie No Country for Old Men by the Coen brothers. The dominant theme in the Coen brother’s movie is evil.

In the novel, The Road, Cormac McCarthy illustrates the expressions, settings and the actions by various literary devices and the protagonist’s struggle to survive in the civilization full of darkness and inhumanity. The theme between a father and a son is appearing, giving both the characters the role of protagonist. Survival, hope, humanity, the power of the good and bad, the power of religion can be seen throughout the novel in different writing techniques. He symbolizes the end of the civilization or what the world had turned out to be as “The Cannibals”. The novel presents the readers with events that exemplify the events that make unexpected catastrophe so dangerous and violent. The novel reduces all human and natural life to the

This film highlights the flaws of humanity in a western world. The films ability to touch on topics of classism, prostitution, and alcoholism makes the content mature and unlike typical western films. This revolutionary and innovative western created a foundation for many future films. The sophistication of the content, and lack of adherence to the production code makes this film an “adult”

In a theme of good versus evil, he would be the devils advocate. He helps the bad by hiding and spending this money while jeopardizing the only family he has. In the novel, Llewlyn is depicted as the protagonist that should survive in the end with his wife. McCarthy has created a genius plot due to the fact, the reader should dislike Llewlyn. His only good trait is his good luck that keeps him alive during most of the novel, and the love he has for his wife. Other than that, he is a greedy man who thinks he is the fittest in Freud’s world, when, in fact, he is the low dog in the survival list. He deludes the reader and himself that he can handle himself and keep him and his wife out of harms way when he clearly could not.

The man finds many dry apples on a farm and collects them, giving his son and him a nice meal.

Archetypal criticism follows a basic rule of categorizing or relating any work of literature into a set framework. It works from a subjective basis, it is used to determine and grasp the ideas of universal truths messages through literary work. The universal truths and messages are determined by identifying patterns like character types, storylines, settings, symbols. The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a novel that accurately exemplifies the principles of archetypal criticism. This narrative account associates the characters of a young minor and his father to encapsulate the ideas of archetypal criticism. McCarthy presents the novel by setting the scene of a death-defying journey through a post-apocalyptic wasteland of America. The young lad

Bitter about the evolution of the corruption of society, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell plays the official hero clinging to old traditions and reminiscing about the old days in No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy. Delusions of a peaceful utopia during the time his grandpa Jack was a sheriff has left Bell looking at the world through hopeless eyes; a world on its knees with only one explanation for its demise: Satan. Not necessarily a religious man, Sheriff Bell, when asked if he believes in Satan, remarks: “He explains a lot of things that otherwise don’t have no explanation. Or not to me they don’t” (218). Throughout No County for Old Men, Sheriff Bell is determined to save Llewellyn Moss in order to prove that justice can be served in a world

Cormac McCarthy’s novel, No Country for Old Men, enlightens the life of Llewellyn Moss, a welder and Vietnam veteran, who happens to stumble upon several murdered bodies, a sufficient supply of cocaine, and two million dollars of cartel drug money. Moss decides to seize the money and consequently sets off a chase for his life against the old hand sheriff Ed Tom Bell and hired psychopathic killer Anton Chigurh. However, McCarthy essentially exploits Moss’ and Chigurh’s escapade only as a subplot and ultimately conveys a deeper meaning. The novelist heavily relies on Bell’s failure to reconcile his morals of the approach crime used to take years before. Through analyzing the characters, moral relativism, and

Throughout Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, the title character is constantly evolving throughout adulthood. We first meet Suttree while he is in prison, a place where he has major conflicts with his inner self. By the end of his journey, Suttree is more unified and has found inner peace. Carl Jung is an analytical psychologist who has many theories based on the human unconscious. Jung’s premier psychological theory of archetypes where every person falls into different archetypes help to identify Suttree. Suttree falls into three different archetypes: the seeker archetype, the innocent archetype, and by the end of the novel the self-archetype. Most of these characteristics are seen through his decisions while interacting with others, but his time spent alone also helps to prove that Suttree has these archetypes more than any others. Also, since he shows to be these three archetypes, it is easier to sympathize with Suttree, instead of declaring him as a solipsistic being. Another one of Carl Jung’s most popular psychological theories is the belief of multiple layers of consciousness. His most popularized belief is the idea of the collective unconscious. In Suttree, the collective unconsciousness is represented through the descriptions of the Reese family. The collective unconscious represents the primitive nature of humans, and the Reese family is McCarthy’s way of showing his feelings towards the collective mind.

Throughout the entire movie No Country for Old Men there is a very strong theme of the juxtaposition of fate and free will. There is endless emphasis on the decisions that characters make, and how their decisions will ultimately affect their lives. All the characters are presented with situations where their choice plays a role in their fate. In No Country for Old Men, the fate of characters is determined by their actions and choices.

The audience of new movies are tired of the same genre over and over. The movie “No Country for Old Men” is a combination of crime, drama and thriller. The movie takes place in the 1980s. A hunter named Llewelyn Moss stumbles upon a drug deal that has gone wrong, and attempts to take the cash left behind. As he takes the cash, he quickly noticed he is being followed by someone recovering the cash.

There are several apparent themes throughout the film “No Country for Old Men”. These themes express a particular opinion about human nature and life in general. Although this film is complex, and in my opinion littered with several themes, the three main themes are violence, good vs. evil, and fate vs. freewill. There are many reasons why these three are the most central themes in this movie, as well as many scenes that portray this observation.

Literature has always attempted to explore the human psyche. Romantic works examine the emotion behind attraction and betrayal, love and desire. Fantasy novels take the reader to an imaginary world, filled with wonders. Gothic literature intertwines romance and horror, and often features the supernatural. Southern Gothic writing explores the gothic within the more realistic bounds of southern culture while revealing the grotesque––the base and broken nature of the human soul and how society is easily susceptible to ruin, both spiritually and physically. As today’s most important Southern Gothic writer, Cormac McCarthy crafts works and themes which delve into the nature of humanity, explore the depravity, futility, and, ultimately, reveal

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen of the Literary and Media Arts Festival. In today’s session, Novel to Film Adaptations – Empowering the Marginalised Perspective, Frank Darabont’s corrupt film adaptation of, The Green Mile, will be exposed as a blatant juxtaposition of Paul Edgecombe’s journal on which it is based. Audiences are invited to follow the disturbing experiences and happenings upon the green mile in 1932 at the Cold Mountain Penitentiary death row. The film constructs Percy Wetmore as cruel, malevolent and aggressive, however, this is contrasted by the reality presented in the journal, through which he portrays characteristics of dedication, determination and intuition. Three scenes evident within both written evidence and film will be pinpointed in today’s presentation explaining why my client, Percy Wetmore has been unjustly represented. Firstly, the Squashing of Mr. Jingles, secondly Delacroix’s Execution, and thirdly, John Coffey’s Arrival. It is apparent through the examination of the character construction of Percy Wetmore within the film, that the representation dehumanizes, exploits and manipulates the actions and intentions of Percy in a manner that is discriminatory.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is bleak, nothing more and nothing less. To put it simply, the world has fallen apart, civilization is no more and everyone is surviving by any means necessary. Despite this depressing setting, McCarthy beautifully describes what the characters are seeing, like a broken down trailer blocking a bridge that’s filled with rotting corpses or a conversation between a man and his wife where the wife admits to have taken on a “new lover”. These scenes are far from typical beauty, one will quickly notice a lack of colors and an excess of muted browns and dull grays. Colors are a rare treat in the gray bleakness that is The Road, their appearance marks the beginning of a brief period of hope before fading into the sea of cold gray ash.