Questions And Answers Of Llewellyn Moss

Question 1:
Llewellyn Moss is a hard-working veteran who’s good with guns and remarkably resourceful and cunning. He’s not a schmuck. He understands that stealing 2.4 million dollars is serious business, and tries to make the best moves—making Carla Jean move to Odessa immediately, hiding the money deep in a vent when staying at a motel, preparing himself for every inevitability. He is paranoid because he understands he needs to be. However, though he’s smart and self-reliant, it’s not enough to prevent casualties.
He is compassionate, and it’s this compassion that simultaneously makes him human and likeable but ultimately gets him and others around him killed. For example, early on he goes back with water for the remaining survivor and therefore

exposes his identity, which is what leads to his death. Additionally, he picks up a hitchhiker, and she dies as a result of her association with him. The final blow is when he fails to take Anton Chigurh seriously enough, and that gets not only him killed, but his wife as well.
We will always root for people like Moss, who are skilled and smart and good people. But in this story Moss dies anyway—and he dies offscreen, in a section break, in the most senseless way possible. Though we, as readers, knew him well, and though we he was loved, and liked, he was still just a man caught up in something much bigger than him, and who died, inevitably.
Chigurh is a hired killer who is very good at his job. He’s well-trained, cold, smart, and incredibly scary. He kills dozens of people over the course of the book. He seems to be almost immune to pain, and performs amateur surgery on himself without batting an eye.
Chigurh is, in a word, a psychopath. Human lives are disposable to him. Oftentimes he kills people without even knowing who they are and with an almost casual air. Near the end of a gunfight in chapter four, Chigurh, about to kill the last gunman, tells him, “Don’t look away. Look at me.” Then he shoots him, and watches the light fade from his eyes. This is similar to how he strangled a deputy, and after the blood had stopped spurting and the deputy was dead, Chigurh lay there, only breathing quietly. There is no violence or passion in the way he kills, only cold calculation, and perhaps some kind of twisted compassion. He is, as Bell put it, a prophet of destruction, in possession of incredible killing power and able to employ it with absolutely no hesitation.
He is also, strangely, a man of his word. He makes a promise to Moss that he’ll kill his wife if Moss doesn’t give up the money, and even after Moss’ death, even though killing her couldn’t possibly benefit him, he sticks to this promise and kills Carla Jean. Additionally, when toying with a man behind the counter at the gas station, Chigurh makes him toss a coin with the implication that what’s at stake is the man’s life. When the man successfully calls it, Chigurh keeps his word, and doesn’t do anything to him.
In this story, Chigurh is the walking personification of evil, everything terrible about the drug trade and crime coalesced into one person. As Sheriff Bell puts it in the beginning of the book, there are terrible people in the world, like the man who murdered a young girl, and the people he reads about in the paper. They are a breed separate from the rest of humanity. They might be going to hell, if it exists, and it doesn’t trouble them. And Chigurh is a breed separate from this breed. Despite this, he “looks like just anybody.” This fact is scarier than anything else about him.
Sheriff Bell is not a man who pushes his chips forward.

He is traditional, nonviolent; he thinks wistfully of the past, when sheriffs didn’t carry guns and knew the phone number of everybody in the county, when people were less awful and didn’t commit terrible crimes every day. He doesn’t pursue the men who shoot through his windshield, he doesn’t go after Chigurh, he doesn’t risk his skin or his soul, because he recognizes that there are forces much stronger than him at play and that fighting is futile. He is completely useless at mitigating anything about the terrible situation at hand. This is illustrated by the fact that the most he can do is speculate at home with his wife about Moss’s whereabouts, or ruminate on his past or the state of the world at large in the italicized

portions.
However, this is ultimately what saves him from worse fates. He doesn’t prevail against evil, and he fails to save Carla Jean or Llewellyn, but manages to come out on the other side just fine—just as he did during World War Two, when he survived only by leaving the rest of his men behind. He is a survivor and spectator, but this is the only way that he can achieve happiness, with a soul unscathed, and with a wife he loves. He is no hero, but he is the only one with a happy ending.
This small fact especially—that Bell is happily married—says something about this story where the evil is great and the casualties immense. It says that there will be people who get killed, even people who don’t deserve it, and there will be prophets of destruction, and there will be tragedies in the paper every day, but it’s possible to have something good among all of that.
Question 2:
There are three main players in this story, and it’s hard to determine which is the protagonist.

Chigurh is successful in meeting his objectives and sticking to his ideals; Bell is one the last men left standing, a spectator that seems to talk directly to the viewer; and Moss follows the classic hero arc most closely, in addition to setting the plot in motion initially. Using the criteria of being successful in meeting objectives and staying true to ideals, Chigurh indisputably fulfills both requirements. Despite that, most people wouldn’t see him as the protagonist, likely because he murders several people, never makes himself likeable or open, and kills the character everybody was rooting for, along with his innocent wife. On paper, he’s protagonist material; however, there’s more to it than that. Similarly, in terms of likeability, and in driving the plot forward, Moss is meant to be the protagonist. Though he’s not particularly on the side of good—he’s only trying to save his life—we root for him and hope he succeeds. But he doesn’t. He dies, and he dies without us seeing. He’s a protagonist, in a sense, but not the true one. Sheriff Bell

is.
He is the protagonist not because he moves the plot forward—he doesn’t—but because he is us. He refuses to walk in front of a prophet of destruction because he doesn’t want to “put his soul at hazard.” He watches the story much in the same way we do, and periodically his narration seems to speak directly to the reader, commiserating with them over how awful the world is and how this particular conflict is a game none of us have, or want to have, any stakes in. By the end of the story, we transition out of this story full of gunfights and drug money and great evil, and instead watch Bell talk about an old guilt with his uncle, retire, talk to his wife, and quietly remember a dream about his dad. He’s the true protagonist because even though he didn’t manage to save anybody, he didn’t die, and he didn’t become a monster like Chigurh. He’s the last one standing with a happy ending.
Extra credit 1:
I think the answer lies in Sheriff Bell’s italiscized portions, when he reminicises about how evil used to be smaller and easier to handle—Bell gets older, but criminals stay the same age. Bell feels as though he can no longer keep up with the young modern atrocities of today. He remembers that the old sheriffs sometimes didn’t even have guns; it seems to him that as time goes on, he gets older, things advance, and higher tech falls into the hands of the police and criminals alike, and the bloodier and worse everything gets.
Extra credit 2:
The idea that the world will always be full of bloodshed and no one can do anything to stop it is clearly reflected in the way Bell looks at but cannot do anything about Llewellyn and Carla Jean’s situation. He understands that there is no point in fighting for the force of good when there is such overwhelming evil, always. In fact, there is no one in this story who puts themselves out there and fights for the force of good at all. Even the good guys are only trying to survive. The overall story is one of futility—Moss dies in a scene break, Bell doesn’t save anybody, and Chigurh escapes completely scot-free.