`` No Country For Old Men `` By Cormac Mccarthy

The use of McCarthy’s style of writing is written in a way that someone can detect the feelings of the character rather than the story of what happened. The purpose for narratives is to focused on the plot of the story but McCarthy wants the readers to really feel exactly what the characters feel so he in repetitive of how “Cold and Grey” (McCarthy 19) the world around them is Even when they are physically battle something like hunger, you can really feel that they were almost always “Out of food” (McCarthy 197).

In this essay, M.D. will analyze the roles and choices the main characters made while relating them to the main theme of good versus evil and fate versus free will in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men.)

Why do you think McCarthy has chosen not to give his characters names? How do the generic labels of “the man” and “the boy” affect the way you /readers relate to them?

Many times throughout one of Ken Kesey’s most famous novels, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the book uses animals as symbols to represent the story’s plot. The animals usually relate to individual characters and their current struggles within the story. Animal imagery provides us with great insight to the themes that Kesey is trying to have us explore, and is a very good tool that the reader can use to help better understand and relate to the characters.

Film Noir, a term coined by the French to describe a style of film characterized by dark themes, storylines, and visuals, has been influencing cinematic industries since the 1940’s. With roots in German expressionistic films and Italian postwar documentaries, film noir has made its way into American film as well, particularly identified in mob and crime pictures. However, such settings are not exclusive to American film noir. One noteworthy example is Billy Wilder’s film Sunset Boulevard, which follows the foreboding tale of Joe Gillis, the desperate-for-success protagonist, who finds himself in the fatal grips of the disillusioned femme fatale Norma Desmond. Not only does the storyline’s heavy subject matter and typical character

Another Country is a fiction book written by James Baldwin in 1962. James Baldwin was an essayist, playwright, and novelist with many popular writings. He is an iconic African American for his writings during the Civil Rights era in the United States focusing on racial and social issues. In Another Country, Baldwin’s characters go through interracial, homosexual, bisexual, and violent relationships. The main character, Rufus Scott, is an African American jazz drummer that commits suicide after the pressures of exploring his sexuality and race. He realizes he feels racial and masculine power when he has sexual encounters with white people due to the Civil Right era where as a black man he has no power. His friends and sister throughout the book feel guilty and try to unveil the reasons Rufus committed suicide, causing them themselves to explore their sexuality and identifying themselves within their race.

During the Great Depression, it was not uncommon to become morosely secluded while working. Men would go far away from their families in search of any jobs they could get, with only themselves to confide in; colleagues only filling in the void of friends and family partially. Naturally, John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men, written during this period, would reflect this fact as a major aspect of the story. Loneliness would become the sinew of Of Mice and Men, manifested in some of the story’s main characters: Candy, Crooks, and Curley’s wife. These allusions to loneliness are found throughout the book, mimicking the rampant disease of isolation at the time.

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

Film Noir was a result of it's time - The war had just ended and It was time where prohibition had influenced an abundance in crime and corruption. Film noir serves to highlight the darkest aspects of human beings. ‘Society is making the machinery of it's own destruction.

Ignorant souls will probably tell you that No Country for Old Men is a film of thirst for blood, material wealth and a sheriff's investigation. Those that suggest this, however, are the same that tune in weekly for their dose of Big Brother: The Evictions and are swayed by the words of their local car salesman. The Coen brothers’ masterful 2005 adaption of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men is a standout in recent cinema history, pushing aside this year’s spit-out of Transformers from explosion-junkie Michael Bay. Taking a different approach from their usual quirky, humour films littered with three word profanities (cue: Burn after Reading Osbourne Cox fans), the Coen’s have successfully stepped into a dark, deeply disquieting drama

In Cawelti’s piece, he talks about the “generic transformation” that appears in Chinatown. Most of all, he points at the “myth” of the hard-boiled detective, a well known noir character archetype that appears in both Chinatown and The Long Goodbye. According to Cawelti, the “hard-boiled” detective is an archetype that is meant to portray the “moral ambiguity” theme often seen in classical film noir. These types of characters are licensed by the state as private investigators, but are far from morally upright beings. They follow their own internal code of ethics, and if the law needs to be broken in order for the job to get done, that is just the way things have to go (Cawelti 499-500). Both Jake Gittes and Philip Marlowe are private investigators who do their own thing when it comes to enforcing the law. Mostly because they realize that the system is corrupt, so they invent their own form of justice. To Gittes, that means lying his way in and out of most situations; to Marlowe that means killing his friend who has committed murder.

Because the movie frequently shifts from intense, enthralling action scenes to dramatic slow-paced scenes, Anthony Lane writes that “as a thriller, No Country for Old Men is tight, pointed, and immune to the temptations of speed. I found myself […] in a state of rare excitement […].” While the action scenes are very fast-paced, the film slows down between them to either emphasize a character trait, further the development of the story, or create a comedic scene. For example, the horror of Chigurh is emphasized between major fight scenes when he kills an innocent person remorselessly (Hunter). The pacing also decelerates to develop the story.

Write an essay in which you discuss this statement in relation to Of Mice and Men.

This essay aims to discuss the origins and traits of film-noir. The characteristics of film noir will be developed through methods of questioning, debating and arguing, in order to gain an understanding and knowledge of the characteristics of film noir. “We could make the case, as many critics have done, that film noir is, in fact, not a genre at all but merely a particular stylistic inflection of a crime drama.” (Nelmes, 2012.194) Film noir is not easily defined.