The Unpunishing of Anton Chigurh: Fraternity as the Final Frontier in No Country for Old Men

Abstract

It is impossible to talk about the genre of the Western without talking about its philosophical impact. The ethics of the Western, as much as the heroes of the West, have long been taken to metonymically represent the philosophical ideals of the United States. The ethics of the cowboy hero is therefore the ethics of the nation the hero stands for. It comes as no surprise, then, that the critiques levered against “cowboy masculinity” also address the need for a more complicated understanding of “frontier justice.” Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men addresses that complex issue of “frontier justice” directly. In so doing, this novel confronts the problem of violence embedded in the martial heroes of Westerns. Since Blood Meridian appeared in 1985, McCarthy’s place in the pantheon of American novelists has been assumed and his works, by and large, have met with critical if not popular success. Yet when No Country was published in 2005, early reviews were largely negative, seeming to find the novel distressingly political, marred by what appeared to be a retrenching conservatism. For example, William Deresiewicz, who appears to consign much of McCarthy’s work to conservative-leaning politics, considers the novel even more egregiously political but without the “imaginative complexity” of McCarthy’s earlier work (Deresiewicz 38).

Silence, the will to dominate, and unacknowledged suffering aren’t a good recipe for happiness or companionability. The model of heroism Westerns provide may help men to make a killing in the stock market, but it doesn’t provide much assistance when they go home for dinner at night.

—Jane Tompkins, West of Everything