Chigurh suggest that Moss can escape accountability. To Chigurh, the relentless killer, Moss’s death is inevitable. There is no escape. But Moss, with his self-interested tunnel-vision, refuses the deal. He is unwilling to give over the money, even if it places his wife at risk. Ever the individualist, he believes he can single-handedly bring himself and Carla Jean to safety. He contacts her immediately to arrange her escape. McCarthy does not afford Moss a proper death scene in the novel. Readers are informed that he is dead in a passing comment – “it’s a long story” – from Bell to a neighboring town sheriff (247). It is a pointedly undignified death for a man who held his own life and interests above those of others, and a devastating indictment of his belief that he was in control of his own destiny. Carla Jean is killed by Chigurh a few scenes later in her own residence, having made no further contact with her husband. Chigurh informs her that he gave Moss an opportunity to give up the briefcase in exchange for her safety and that his offer was refused (247, 260). Carla Jean reasons that Chigurh “don’t have to” kill her (259). He has the briefcase and Moss is dead. Why not let her live? But Chigurh insists that he must do as he promised, and that she must die as a consequence of her husband’s choices. She is now fated to die, even if she would choose to live. To prove it, he offers Carla Jean a final chance to live if she correctly calls a coin toss. She calls tails. Chigurh flips the coin, reveals heads, and shoots her dead. Carla Jean’s death-by-coin-toss is a powerful metaphor for the incapacity of individuals to control their own destiny. Her fate serves as a repudiation of Moss’s brand of rugged individualism. She may have chosen incorrectly, but the stakes of the coin toss were forced upon her as a direct consequence of his self-interest and pathological self-reliance. His complicity in her death proves a central tenet of his doctrine false; that he is morally immune from judgement for the effects his actions have on others. In “Democracy, Justice, and Tragedy in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men," Benjamin Mangrum draws connections between Nietzschean concepts and the novel’s nihilism and argues that unchecked freedom of the kind Moss believes in can be disastrous for society. Placing moral authority wholly within the individual, as Moss does, is akin to “unchain[ing] the earth from its sun” and “straying through an infinite nothing” (110). To attempt to enact such freedom, Mangrum suggests, is an exercise in futility because no individualist within any society is truly free due to the “inherent limits of their world” (108). They are bound by the consequences of their actions to themselves and others. The individualist may try to ignore such consequences – as Moss did by running – but they are more likely to compound than disappear. The rugged individualist is not immune. In fact, the actions justified by “freedom from accountability” accrue such terrible consequences that the principle stops making sense. Moss may believe he is immune and free but, as Mangrum points out (111), he fails to ask a pivotal question: What good 101
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