No Country for Old Men panoramically presents an intensely disturbing and sharply refined story that mixes and confuses the divine with what is most base in the human spirit. While the plot is not demanding in the whole, McCarthy presents his characters and scenes in a Faulknarian piecemeal fashion, challenging the reader to recognize, then internalize the important plot elements while discarding the chattel of which there is very little given McCarthy’s taunt writing style, similar to that of Hemingway while being less astringent.
The story opens simply enough, disguising McCarthy’s complexly colliding themes. Llewelyn Moss, a 36-year old Vietnam veteran, is hunting antelope out on a barren desert mesa set somewhere along the Mexican-American border. It is revealed later in the story that Moss served three tours between 1964 and 1968, helping to place the period of the story in the early 1980s and not in own current time as many critics have surmised. Moss is a careful and patient man observing the landscape meticulously. After sighting several antelope but proving not able to bag one, he notes through binoculars an extraordinary scene involving pickup trucks and several apparently dead bodies. Moss observes this scene for a long time.
Finally convinced of the scene’s stasis, Moss walks to inspect what appears to have been a drug deal gone horribly awry. A pickup truck bed of heroin remains untouched at the site. A Mexican driver in a second vehicle is not so lucky having been shot, remaining barely alive. He asks Moss for water which Moss does not have. Moss procures a machine pistol from the wounded Mexican and continues to survey the scene. Moss concludes that everyone involved in this transaction did not survive it, and that one of the parties is missing. Moss follows a telling blood trail for about a mile finding a man, bled to death, this a file case filled with $100 bills, 24,000 of them in neat bank stacks of $20,000 each. Moss takes the money and returns late to his trailer that he shares with his young wife, Carla Jean. After securing the money and the machine pistol, Moss fills a gallon jug with water and begins to leave the trailer. When asked by his wife what he is doing, Moss casually responds, “I’m fixin’ to do somethin’ dumber than hell, but I’m goin’ anyways.”
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