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Cormac mccarthy analysis
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Cormac mccarthy analysis
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Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men follows three very different men in a tense cat and mouse chase through several border towns. It begins with a drug smuggling deal gone very wrong in the middle of the desert that leaves behind a truck bed full of cocaine and a sack with 1.4 million dollars left for someone to discover. When on a hunting endeavor, Llewelyn Moss discovers the scene and the million dollars. When he takes the money, he seals his fate with a brutal killer named Anton Chiguhr, and the old Sheriff, Ed Tom Bell. These men display three different personalities and mannerisms. The three main characters in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men represent three different generations. Ed Tom Bell is Sheriff for a small town in Arizona along the border and he is very concerned for his people but he often shows the decline in society and displays it in a calm but poignant manner that appears frequently in Bell’s soliloquies through out the book, “A meditative Sheriff named Bell, Sheriff Bell hints more at hopelessness then hope” (Cheuse). Bell is not with out the wisdom that age brings and has seen his share of atrocities World War 2, “Decorated for bravery sheriff bell has family links to the old west and to the Texas lawman tradition. He represents the vanished world where sheriffs knew and cared for their people” (Deirdre). Bell from a generation of Children raised to answer, “yes ma’am,” and, “no ma’am,” is devout to his sense of right and wrong and his calling in life, “He’s an aging warrior carrying an ancient guilt of his own, but still firm in his knowledge of right and wrong and his devotion to duty” (Wolley) Bell’s generation has a quality of kindness and a caring nature that is predominant in Bell’s chara... ... middle of paper ... ...red (NPR)(n.d.): Newspaper source. EBSCO. Web. 16 Nov. 2009. Poling, Dean. “Book review: “No Country for Old Men”/ Cormac McCarthy. Valdesta Daily Times, The (Valdesta , GA) 2 Nov. 2007: Newspaper source. EBSCO. Web. 16 Nov. 2009. McCarthy, Cormac. No Country for Old Men. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. Jeff, Simon. “No Country for Old Men: The west is dry, dusty and darn mean: its dry dusty and darn mean in? No Country.” Buffalo news, The (NY) 16 Nov. 2007: Newspaper source. EBSCO. Web. 17 Nov. 2009. The Cormac McCarthy Homepages: The official website of Cormac McCarthy Society. Web. 16 Nov. 2009. Vognar , Chris. “No Country for Old Men.” Dallas Morning News, The (TX)07. 17 Nov. 2009. Wolley, Bryan. “Even murder doesn’t sedate lead villain in ‘No Country.” Dallas Morning newspaper source. EBSCO. Web. 18 Nov. 2009.
The setting of the essay is Los Angeles in the 1800’s during the Wild West era, and the protagonist of the story is the brave Don Antonio. One example of LA’s Wild West portrayal is that LA has “soft, rolling, treeless hills and valleys, between which the Los Angeles River now takes its shilly-shallying course seaward, were forest slopes and meadows, with lakes great and small. This abundance of trees, with shining waters playing among them, added to the limitless bloom of the plains and the splendor of the snow-topped mountains, must have made the whole region indeed a paradise” (Jackson 2). In the 1800’s, LA is not the same developed city as today. LA is an undeveloped land with impressive scenery that provides Wild West imagery. One characteristic of the Wild West is the sheer commotion and imagery of this is provided on “the first breaking out of hostilities between California and the United States, Don Antonio took command of a company of Los Angeles volunteers to repel the intruders” (15). This sheer commotion is one of methods of Wild West imagery Jackson
Source #3: Kennedy, X.J., and Dana Gioia. Literature An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. 9th. New York: Pearson Longman, 2005.
O’Connor, Flannery. “Essays and Letters On ‘Good Country People’” Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry and Drama. Ed. Robert DiYanni. 6th ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 2007. 233-234.
Ditsky, John. "Good Country People: Overview." Reference Guide to Short Fiction. Ed. Noelle Watson. Detroit: St. James Press, 1994. Literature Resource Center. Web. 26 Mar. 2011.
Literary Reference Center. Web. The Web. The Web. 24 Feb. 2016.
Jehlen, Myra. "The Family Militant: Domesticity Versus Politics in Uncle Tom's Cabin." Criticism 31 (Fall 1989): 383-400.
The story is an Eastern take on the Hollywood western with a dash of satire,
Meyer, Michael. The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 2189.
Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Over the years, the idea of the western frontier of American history has been unjustly and falsely romanticized by the movie, novel, and television industries. People now believe the west to have been populated by gun-slinging cowboys wearing ten gallon hats who rode off on capricious, idealistic adventures. Not only is this perception of the west far from the truth, but no mention of the atrocities of Indian massacre, avarice, and ill-advised, often deceptive, government programs is even present in the average citizen’s understanding of the frontier. This misunderstanding of the west is epitomized by the statement, “Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis was as real as the myth of the west. The development of the west was, in fact, A Century of Dishonor.” The frontier thesis, which Turner proposed in 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition, viewed the frontier as the sole preserver of the American psyche of democracy and republicanism by compelling Americans to conquer and to settle new areas. This thesis gives a somewhat quixotic explanation of expansion, as opposed to Helen Hunt Jackson’s book, A Century of Dishonor, which truly portrays the settlement of the west as a pattern of cruelty and conceit. Thus, the frontier thesis, offered first in The Significance of the Frontier in American History, is, in fact, false, like the myth of the west. Many historians, however, have attempted to debunk the mythology of the west. Specifically, these historians have refuted the common beliefs that cattle ranging was accepted as legal by the government, that the said business was profitable, that cattle herders were completely independent from any outside influence, and that anyone could become a cattle herder.
Harmon, William, and C. Hugh Holman. A Handbook to Literature. 8th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999.
O'Connor, Flannery. "Good Country People." Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Ed. Robert DiYanni. 5th ed. New York, NY: McGraw, 2002. 181-194.
Sickels, Robert C., and Marc Oxoby. “In Search of a Further Frontier: Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.” Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey Hunter.Vol. 295. Detroit: Gale, 2011. N.pag. Literature Resource Center. Web. 5 May 2011.
Though it is traditionally thought of as being the Wild West with gun-slinging cowboys and treacherous bandits, this is not an accurate picture of the West. In McCarthy’s West, the just cowboys do not save the day because they do not even exist. The West that seems too terrible to be real was real. McCarthy depicts, with minimal embellishment, the actual life lived out by real men along the Mexican-American border at that time. The violence was real (Sanderson 48). The blood-soaked Southwest of McCarthy was one of the first of its time, creating much controversy. He shows it to be as it truly was, not, as other writers had done before, to show it as the fun cowboy land that it simply was not (Handley 341). It is only treacherous bandits opposing other treacherous bandits, fighting for turf and spilling blood all the while.
McMichael, G., et. al., (1993) Concise Anthology of American Literature- 5th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.