









































Monsters are tied to what we consider 
normal or abnormal in our cultures. 
Jeffrey Cohen’s “monster theory” states 
that society places its own anxiety or 
fear of something or someone who 
breaks cultural expectations into the 
monsters they create. The fear we have 
of these monsters makes them incredibly 
popular in our cultures. In Cormac 
McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men, the 
main antagonist and cold-blooded killer 
Chigurh fits the mold of the monster 
theory perfectly in many ways. In the 
novel, after stealing millions of dollars 
from a drug deal gone awry, Moss is 
hunted down by Chigurh ruthlessly. He 
represents both the fear and desire of our 
societal norms by rejecting all humanity 
via his brutality; however, he maintains 
a playfulness when it comes to deciding 
his victims’ fates, utilizing coin-flipping 
to determine whether the victims live or 

die. By looking at Chigurh through the 
lens of “monster theory,” we see that he 
fits the mold of the traditional villain 
in crime fiction stories, while also 
managing to surprise readers by just 
how nefarious he really is. Of course, it 
would be unwise to assume that Chigurh 
is without humanity; he is often given 
shockingly human characteristics to 
ground him in reality, which makes 
him and the state of lawlessness he 
brings about all the more terrifying. 
What we gain by applying monster 
theory is seeing how a society’s fear 
of violent crime is personified; it also 
lets us attempt to reassure ourselves of 
our own humanity in comparison to 
the absolute inhumanity of Chigurh. 
Through Chigurh, McCarthy has 
created one of the most memorable and 
remarkable monsters in crime fiction.

The New Law of the Land: 
The Monster in No Country For 

Old Men

Will Callan, Ball State University

86



Jeffrey Cohen’s original “monster theory” states that monsters are representative 
of our fears of something or someone that breaks our cultural norms. In Cormac 
McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men, many tropes of the monstrous villain are both 
exhibited and contradicted by the primary antagonist Chigurh. Recruited to hunt 
down Moss for stealing millions of dollars in cash from a drug deal gone awry, we 
are given practically no knowledge of the person Chigurh was before the events of 
the story. The fact that he is a calculating, cold-blooded killer fits the monster theory 
lens present in crime fiction, but because Chigurh remains free at the end of the 
novel, lacks a motive or backstory, and is childishly characterized via his ignorance 
of his personal evil, he differs from the usual crime narrative monster. Chigurh still 
being free to commit more crimes is what makes McCarthy’s central message about 
crime in general stronger. It paints an incredibly bleak picture of crime in modern 
America. To McCarthy, crime has gotten more violent since the old days, and there’s 
nothing that can be done to stop it. This has real-world implications, with the 
primary message that Bell’s friend Ellis tries to convey being that it is futile to try to 
change the world by oneself. 
 Chigurh uses coin-flipping to decide his victims’ fate, creating a sense of 
arbitrariness to his crimes. This shows that he operates on chance rather than an 
actual moral system. While it would be misguided to assume Chigurh is completely 
inhuman, analyzing him with monster theory can reassure us of our own humanity 
in comparison to his ruthlessness. This is important in a world where crime grows 
more violent and ruthless. Using the lens of monster theory, we can identify the 
tropes of crime fiction, understand why they are relevant to society and crime in 
general, and analyze how our fears of violent crime are personified through monsters 
like Chigurh. All these aspects lead to a unique approach to crime narratives in which 
we anticipate the monster to be foiled by the good guys of the story. For the purposes 
of this examination, the novel will be used as the primary source as opposed to the 
film, owing to the narrative choices offered in the novel which alternate between 
sections narrated in the first person by Sheriff Bell and sections narrated in the third 
person perspective. 
 Monster theory encapsulates the fears of many different cultures’ definitions of 
what is considered abnormal. In the theoretical framework, monsters are defined as 
anything that challenges established norms. To this end, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock 
says of monsters, “[T]he monster is the thing that, from a particular perspective in a 
given context, shouldn’t be, but is” (3). In other words, monsters represent everything 
that could foreseeably go wrong in a thing or person from a certain perspective. 
There is little doubt that monsters have been related to a negative connotation in 

Callan

87



culture, associated with something to fear and to be disgusted by. However, another 
facet of monster theory is how viewing monsters allows for introspection into 
one’s own humanity. This is a key tenet of monster theory and one which Asma 
acknowledges when the author writes, “The monster is a beneficial foe, helping us to 
virtually represent the obstacles that real life will surely send our way” (293). A way 
of interpreting this is by recognizing monsters as a stand-in for hurdles in our lives 
that we compare to our own humanity. Reassuring ourselves that we are normal is a 
coping mechanism, and monster theory also states that another way of coping with 
potential flaws is by placing all irregularities on one monster. 
 Another key tenet of what monsters are is defined by Beal, who uses Sigmund 
Freud’s idea of unheimlich, or the inability to feel at home. Beal writes, “Monsters 
are personifications of the unheimlich. They stand for what endangers one’s sense of 
at-homeness, that is, one’s sense of security, stability, integrity, well-being, health, 
and meaning” (297-298). This is a way of saying that monsters contradict everything 
that makes us feel safe and stable. Monsters may appear to us in countless situations, 
but we never truly get over how uncomfortable they make us feel. Monsters are 
strikingly inhuman most of the time, and this reassures us that we are human in 
comparison. But this begs the question of how monsters fit into crime and crime 
fiction. 
 Monsters appear quite commonly in crime fiction. We often perceive fictional 
criminals as monsters, since they reject everything we hold dear in a civilized 
society. By applying monster theory to crime fiction, we can reassure ourselves 
of our faith in the criminal justice system. Chigurh, of course, breaks this faith in 
law enforcement by managing to evade them, as they are portrayed as helpless to 
stop the chain of events in the novel. As is typical in crime narratives, our faith 
in criminal justice and punishment is jeopardized because of this. In an article on 
the ineffectiveness of police leadership, Simmons-Beauchamp and Sharpe argue, 
“The internal divide sustains the Eurocentric, male-dominated perspectives as 
police organizations are not typically reflective of the communities they serve” (1). 
The barrier this speaks of is the “us vs. them” mentality, which allows for police 
leadership to be perceived as helpless. 
 This ineffectiveness of the law is made more apparent by McCarthy only being 
able to provide details about how things used to be. Our expectation that monsters 
take advantage of the weakness of ordinary people to be dealt justice, a typical 
aspect of crime fiction, is subverted by McCarthy’s thesis that criminals can get away 
with what they intend to do. Through Chigurh, McCarthy also makes a statement 
about the growing violence of crime in America and our desensitization towards it. 
Sheriff Bell laments the time when his father was a man of the law and didn’t even 

Callan

88



need to carry a gun, but those times seem to be gone in the novel. At the end of the 
novel, Bell retires, essentially giving up on punishing the monster in this story. By 
retiring, the sheriff represents how the old ways he’s depended on in the past do not 
work any longer; this is not a country for old men. Near the end of the novel, Bell 
has a conversation with his friend Ellis. He talks about the nostalgia he has for the 
old days when things were simpler. Ellis, however, speaks to the fact that it’s not one 
person’s job to fix the world and rid it of evil as Bell had hoped, and that there have 
always been monstrous criminals such as Chigurh. He also reiterates that the good 
old days are based on Bell’s nostalgia and perception of the time rather than actual 
fact. 
 Monster theory has been established thus far in terms of how we define it and 
the shapes it takes. We have also determined why this is useful for us. The question 
remains how this relates to the monster of No Country For Old Men, Chigurh, and 
how this helps us better understand crime fiction. Moss is hunted ruthlessly by 
Chigurh, who is also in his own way a symbol of the law of the new world or lack 
thereof. Chigurh neatly fits into the definition of a monster in many respects, but he 
also has many human moments in which he becomes even more terrifying to us. 
 McCarthy’s characters, particularly Bell, lament the time when law enforcement 
had an easier time on the job, saying, “Even when I say anything about how the 
world is going hell in a handbasket people will just sort of smile and tell me I’m 
gettin’ old” (196). This is an explanation of McCarthy’s very concerns for civilized 
society. It is because of monsters like Chigurh that this long-lost, old way of life is 
unachievable when the novel’s events take place. The change from civilization to the 
onset of anarchy seems to have taken place when people abandoned the rules which 
held society together in old times, allowing monsters to gain power and prominence. 
This also aligns with what McCarthy is saying about breaking the pre-established 
rules of a cohesive society in general and how monsters influence how violent 
crime can become. Commentary on crime fiction such as this paints a grim picture 
of violence in America and how monsters represent that sort of violence. Of course, 
more can be said about this violence and its significance. 
 The brutal world Chigurh inhabits is one which is made for a monster like him. 
Society’s fear of violent crime is personified through Chigurh, who also manages to 
break many of the expectations for crime fiction villains and monsters in general. 
Chigurh spends the novel hunting Moss and tormenting Bell, and even the law 
cannot prevent the world from sliding into anarchy. This is a concerning message 
for those who respect the law. The old world that Bell mourns for is long dead in 
No Country For Old Men. However, it is in this world that criminals like Chigurh, 
who is immediately portrayed as a giant and cunning man, thrive. Favero writes of 

Callan

89



this brutal world that exists in the novel: “The world Bell must confront is one to 
which Chigurh has already assimilated. It is materialistic, nihilistic, deterministic, 
mechanistic, and neoliberal, and Chigurh has risen to its challenges to become 
successful in his line of work” (159). Through this, we learn that the world Ed Tom 
Bell started his career in has changed for the worse, and only those who can adapt 
will be able to survive it. It is also implied that only those who are truly evil are 
capable of assimilating into this world so hostile to old men like Bell. 
 This all is an incredibly grim statement about what we can expect from the 
heroes of our typical stories. The idea of evil triumphing over good is reinforced 
when in the novel Bell says, “[i]t takes very little to govern good people. Very little. 
And bad people can’t be governed at all” (McCarthy 64). Through this, McCarthy 
lays out what he thinks of good and evil. Chigurh obviously falls into the category 
of evil, which fits the trope of the villainous criminal. Nevertheless, it’s Chigurh’s 
triumph over Bell and the law as a whole that makes him different from this trope. A 
monster theory view of this problem would say that this is a product of our culture’s 
fears of a monster that cannot be vanquished or easily removed from society, and 
this creates problems for the resolutions we expect in crime fiction. There is even 
more to be said about the monster theory view of crime and how one becomes the 
monster capable of these sorts of acts. 
 Chigurh has many monstrous moments in the novel, such as when he kills 
Moss’s wife, Carla Jean, for seemingly no reason. Upon returning from the funeral 
of her mother, she finds Chigurh in her house and instantly knows why. Even Carla 
Jean herself says that there is no reason for her to have to die, but Chigurh shoots 
her anyway to fulfill the promise he made to her husband that he would kill her. The 
section in which she is killed is narrated omnisciently at first before returning to the 
perspective of Bell, who has his own reaction to the horrific coldness of it. Of course, 
to assume that Chigurh is without any humanity is not only wrong but runs contrary 
to McCarthy’s message. Chigurh has many surprisingly human moments in the novel. 
Even the way he rummages through the fridge for milk at Moss’s house after barging 
in to search for him is incredibly human and almost childlike; there are several 
instances in which this is done. This all makes him even more terrifying because 
it suggests that even the most monstrous characters are essentially human. It also 
opens the question of what it takes for someone human to become such a monster. 
 McCarthy gives almost no details on Chigurh’s past, leaving this incredibly 
important question decidedly ambiguous. One of his more human moments is 
revealed by forcing his victims to reflect on the nature of life and death. Phipps 
writes of this very introspection, “The novel lends itself well to philosophical and 
theological questions about life and death since its main antagonist, Anton Chigurh, 

Callan

90



forces many of his victims to take up introspective reflection even as he dispenses 
death with cold ruthlessness” (38). In other words, there is an inherent contradiction 
in how Chigurh acts when killing people. On the one hand, he is utterly brutal and 
without conscience, but on the other, he also sees it as being necessary to force his 
victims to reflect psychologically. In the text, when considering what he needs to 
do to survive the people hunting him after hiding the money he took, Moss thinks 
to himself, “[b]y the time he got up he knew he was probably going to have to kill 
somebody. He just didn’t know who it was” (McCarthy 87). This is significant because 
it shows that Moss must resort to acts he doesn’t want to do just to survive. The 
question becomes whether Chigurh started on a similar path. The sparse details of 
Chigurh’s past leave open the possibility that he started off in a similar situation 
compared to Moss, slowly doing more and more criminal things just to survive. 
By looking at this through the monster theory lens, we can attempt to unlock 
how monsters come about and what their synthesis is. Still, matters are further 
complicated by the role fate has in Chigurh’s killings. 
 Chigurh uses coin-flipping to decide the fate of his victims, which is a playful 
spin on the cold-blooded murder he specializes in. This also gives the reader the 
impression that Chigurh is a dispatcher of justice. Our expectation for justice to 
be served by the good guys of the crime narrative is again subverted in this way 
because Chigurh serving his own cruel form of justice displays a law of the land that 
relies on violence as a means to an end. Moreover, the use of coin-flipping makes 
this all seem arbitrary and tragic to McCarthy’s audience. Mangrum writes of the 
tragic nature of “justice” in No Country For Old Men, saying, “McCarthy’s characters 
are subject to the tragic tension between aspiring for justice and the absence of the 
good, searching for the real and misunderstanding the presence of the transcendent 
because of the inherent limits of their world” (108). In other words, the author is 
elaborating on how the absence of justice is just another form of the new law of 
the land that is present in McCarthy’s novel. The bleakness of No Country For Old 
Men allows for a statement on the primal nature of justice when evil individuals 
take the law into their own hands. Also present is the idea that even if Carla Jean 
were to survive Chigurh by correctly calling the coin toss, it would have simply been 
someone else’s turn to die on perhaps a different day or under other circumstances. 
This approach towards chance and determining who gets to live or die is certainly 
befitting of a monster. The arbitrary nature of crime in the novel is a way of saying 
that it is pointless to try to stop it. 
 Chigurh also differs from typical monsters in crime narratives where the villain 
is caught in the end, because he escapes. After killing Carla Jean, he is involved in 
a vehicle collision while driving and breaks his arm. He pays a boy to give him his 

Callan

91



shirt to use as a sling and gets away before the police arrive. Ultimately, by evading 
capture and justice at the novel’s conclusion, No Country For Old Men contradicts 
the traditional crime narrative where the villainous monster is captured. The 
significance of Chigurh remaining free is that we are never truly safe from monsters. 
Chigurh remains uncaptured to presumably commit more horrendous crimes, and this 
breaks many traditions of crime narratives where it is expected that the bad guy will 
be foiled in the end. The expectation that the culprit is busted at the end of the crime 
narrative reassures us that violent criminals can never succeed. 

 Through an incredibly austere view of justice and crime, No Country For Old 
Men presents a world where evil and monsters are allowed to reign. This world 
is one in which old men like Sheriff Bell cannot hope to survive like in the days 
of yore. The villain Chigurh, by constantly subverting our expectations for crime 
narratives in the novel, represents the new law of the land over which he presides 
in a terrifyingly bleak commentary about the state of anarchy and justice. Chigurh 

Callan

92

Figure 1. Film capture of Anton Chigurh in the movie adaption of  No Country for Old Men, 2007.



is truly monstrous in the way he plays with his victims and takes pleasure in 
hunting people down, allowing us to get a glimpse of McCarthy’s grim perspective 
on monstrous criminals. While it is important to make the distinction that not all 
criminals are inherently monsters, monsters often happen to be horrible criminals in 
how they break the expected rules of society. Monster theory is thus shown as being 
present in No Country For Old Men via Chigurh. With Moss’s death and Chigurh 
escaping to presumably commit more crimes at the novel’s conclusion, McCarthy is 
suggesting that lawlessness will prevail because of monsters like Chigurh; moreover, 
the good guys such as Bell don’t have a chance to stop the bad guys by holding to 
the old ways. Not only is this a serious departure from what is anticipated in crime 
stories, but it also is symptomatic of a general shift in our perception of the trust we 
place in law enforcement to protect us from this state of anarchy described in the 
novel. Via analysis from the lens of a monster theory perspective, it becomes clear 
that Chigurh’s monstrosity provides commentary for how we analyze criminals. At 
the end of the day, McCarthy suggests that we will never be truly safe from these 
kinds of monsters and that trying to rid the world of them is futile. 

Callan

93



Works Cited 

Asma, Stephen. “Monsters and the Moral Imagination.” Monster Theory Reader, 
edited by Jeffrey Weinstock. University of Minnesota Press, 2020, pp. 289-294. 

Beal, Timothy. “Introduction to Religion and its Monsters.” Monster Theory Reader, 
edited by Jeffrey Weinstock. University of Minnesota Press, 2020, pp. 295-302. 

Favero, Douglas. “You don’t have to do this: Cormac McCarthy’s  and the Courage 

to Be.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal, vol. 19, no. 2, 2021, pp. 157-177, www.
muse.jhu.edu/article/814965. Accessed 10 December 2022. 

Mangrum, Benjamin. “Democracy, Justice, and Tragedy in .” Religion and 

Literature, 2011, pp. 107-133, www.jstor.org/stable/23347090?pq-
origsite=summon#metadata_info_tab_contents. Accessed 16 January 2023. 

McCarthy, Cormac. No Country For Old Men. Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. 

Phipps, Gregory. “Death and the Search for Heideggerian Authenticity in .” The 
Cormac McCarthy Journal, vol. 18, no. 1, 2020, pp. 37-55, www.muse.jhu.edu/
article/751604. Accessed 11 December 2022. 

Simmons-Beauchamp, Bobbi, & Sharpe, Hillary. “The Moral Injury of Ineffective 

Police Leadership: a Perspective.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 13, 2022, www.
frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.766237/full. 

Weinstock, Jeffrey. “Introduction: A Genealogy of Monster Theory.” The Monster 
Theory Reader, edited by Jeffrey Weinstock. University of Minnesota Press, 
2020, pp. 1-36.

Callan

94

http://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/814965
http://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/814965
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23347090?pq-origsite=summon#metadata_info_tab_contents
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23347090?pq-origsite=summon#metadata_info_tab_contents
http://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/751604
http://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/751604
http://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.766237/full
http://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.766237/full

