Though these critics discuss rugged individualism, their analyses frame it as a trait of characters who operate within the world of the novel. This article ties it to archetypes represented by the main characters – the cowboy, the killer, and the sheriff. This approach allows for an allegorical reading of the novel as concerned with the extent to which rugged individualism runs through America’s lifeblood. No Country for Old Men is a cautionary tale about the ideology’s moral and social implications. As I will show, the three main characters see themselves as moral islands. Their moral reasoning is a closed loop: they do not take into account the impact of their actions on others. By and large, in their thinking, the moral correctness of their own actions extend only so far as those actions serve their own interests. This worldview is sustained because they also hold themselves immune from the moral judgement of others. No Country for Old Men shows how the moral immunity held to by rugged individualists is at odds with the collective reality in which they live. The cowboy, the killer, and the sheriff each justify collectively indefensible actions through rugged individualist lenses, achieving different results. The cowboy ends up dead while the sheriff is able to walk away from the situation unharmed, but both have their town in Terrell County gutted by the killer’s violence. The slaughter of innocents presents a profound failure of the individualist ethos. Whether or not their actions serve their own interests, they are unable to stop their actions from affecting those beyond themselves and are also unable to remain unaffected by others. In this reading, No Country for Old Men serves as an allegory about the pitfalls of ascribing to the moral immunity of rugged individualism. The Cowboy One night, while out hunting, small-town welder Lleweyn Moss stumbles across a drug deal gone bad: abandoned vehicles with keys still in the ignition, dogs and humans shot dead, weapons scattered in the desert sand, and, most notably, a trail of bloody footsteps leading away from the scene. At the end of the trail, he finds another corpse clutching a briefcase containing $2.4 million dollars. Instead of fleeing or calling the police, Moss turns to his sense of rugged individualism: he will handle this. He takes the briefcase and runs. As he later tells his wife, “I’m fixin to go do somethin dumbern hell but I’m goin anways” (McCarthy 24). To understand how Moss’s actions speak to his archetypal character, it is necessary to understand how this individualism makes him more broadly representative. For the purposes of this argument, the ideology of “individualism” is formally defined as Harry Triandis does, quoted by Elizabeth C. Hirschman. Accordingly, individualism is “a social pattern that consists of loosely linked individuals who view themselves as independent of collectives . . . and emphasize rational analyses of the advantages and disadvantages of 98
99 Publizr Home