"No Country for Old Men"

Paper Summary:

The paper explains the main theme of Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men", which is the sideslip of the modern world towards evil and depravity. The paper goes on to show how the book emphasizes the dark side of American life, with its extreme corruption and violence. The paper also highlights how the world constructed by McCarthy appears as an entrapment for the modern man, which not only encloses him tightly but also blinds him to anything else. The paper concludes that in McCarthy's novel, evil in the modern world is not so much perpetuated through actual perpetration, but through the modern's universe lack of concern for the distinction between good and bad.

From the Paper:

"Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men takes its title from William Butler Yeats' famous poem Sailing to Byzantium. The title therefore already announces the main theme of the book: the sideslip of the modern world towards evil and depravity. The fast paced action of the novel and the sketchy descriptions make of the book a Western and even a literary thriller, but, at a deeper level, the text is fraught with profound meanings about the battle between the forces of evil and the forces of good. McCarthy's world is filled with too much corruption and evil and too little good. The chain of gruesome crimes and amoral deeds pervades the whole of the novel. McCarthy thus depicts the modern world as a state of things in which the equipoise between good and evil is lost. This why the world is no longer fitted for old men who belong to a more balanced and ordered state of things."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Gwyn, Aaron. "No Country for Old Men. Book Review." The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 2005 v25 i3 p 138(2)
• McCarthy, Cormac. No Country for Old Men. New York: Knopf, 2005.
• Strong, Benjamin. "A prophet of Gore." The New Leader 88.4 (July-August 2005): 31(2).
• Walter, Kim. "Texas Noir." The New York Times Book Review, July 24, 2005 p 9.

More papers on "No Country for Old Men":

• Book Review # 150400 : "Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men"
• Analytical Essay # 58787 : "Grumpy Old Men"
• Analytical Essay # 147143 : "Schizophrenia in Reality and in the Media"

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