Early in the novel, after Bell surveys the carnage in the desert, he tells Lamar: 'I just have this feelin we're looking at something we really aint never even seen before'.

Why is this style so powerful and so well-suited to the story he tells in No Country for Old Men?ģ. McCarthy has a distinctive prose style-pared down, direct, colloquial-and he relies on terse, clipped dialogue rather than narrative exposition to move his story along. The title of the novel comes from William Butler Yeats's poem 'Sailing to Byzantium': 'That is no country for old men, the young / In one another's arms, birds in the trees, /-Those dying generations-at their song.' The poem also contains the lines: 'An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick, / Unless soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing / For every tatter in its mortal dress.' Why has McCarthy chosen a line from Yeats' poem for his title? In what ways is No Country for Old Men about aging? Does Sheriff Bell experience any kind of spiritual rejuvenation as he ages?Ģ. The pursuit stretches along and across the border, each participant seemingly determined to answer what one asks another: How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life? A harrowing story of a war that society wages on itself, an enduring meditation of the ties of love and blood and duty that inform lives and shape destinies, and a novel of extraordinary resonance and power. One party in the failed transaction hires an ex-Special Forces officer to defend his interests against a mesmerizing freelancer, while on either side are men accustomed to spectacular violence and mayhem. But only after two more men are murdered does a victim's burning car lead Sheriff Bell to the carnage out in the desert, and he soon realizes that Moss and his young wife are in desperate need of protection.

Packing the money out, he knows, will change everything. Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, instead finds men shot dead, a load of heroin, and over $2 million in cash. Set along a bloody frontier in our own time, this is Cormac McCarthy's first novel since Cities of the Plain completed his acclaimed, best-selling 'Border Trilogy.'

No country for old men paperback