No Country plausibility issues (spoilers!)

[Richard Ryan]

Suppose this discussion needs a spoilers alert....

So Wells is subject to the karmic laws of hubris and Chigurh is not?  Chigurh sees himself as the living embodiment of fate, and possesses an indestructibility that is completely unbelievable and out of keeping with any psychological or aesthetic realism.

The problem with Chigurh as a character (a serious technical flaw that applies to The Judge in Blood Meridian)  is that at a certain point you realize he's not a man - he's a horror movie monster,  a la Jason Vorhees or Freddy Krueger.  No matter what the protagonists do to defeat a horror movie monster you know these creatures always resurrect in the end, because they're plot devices rather than realized characters.

 By the way, anyone who has ever grown up or spent any time at all in Texas knows that the chances of  state or local Texas lawmen simply dropping their pursuit of a serial killer who has strangled a young deputy to escape from jail are precisely zero.  McCarthy and his whiny neo-con narrator are living on the wrong planet.

I personally can live with Keith's explanation that No Country is an entertainment that doesn't bear scrutiny.  

----- Original Message ----
From: Daniel Julius <daniel.julius at gmail.com>
To: Richard Ryan <richardryannyc at yahoo.com>
Cc: Keith <keithsz at mac.com>; Pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2007 9:52:46 AM
Subject: Re: Tree of Smoke


How about because of his hubris?  Remember his confidence in the
office?  "He's a sociopath, but there's a lot of them in this world."
And then his portrayal of himself as The Only Hope for Moss in the
hospital?

Not only has he had his day like Mr. Haney suggests, but he is falsely
confident that he is still living in that moment.

--
Dan


On Nov 18, 2007 4:16 PM, Richard Ryan <richardryannyc at yahoo.com> wrote:
> The writing is evocative, but that scene made no sense to me.  Why
 did Wells, a trained killer like Chigurh, go docilely to his death? Why
 did he walk into Chigurh's trap and then submit to his own execution?
  And why did McCarthy introduce an interesting character - in some sense
 a sane version of Chigurh - and then eliminate him? To make a some
 didactic point about the implacability of Chigurh and the evil that he
 represents?
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Keith <keithsz at mac.com>
> To: Pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2007 4:55:24 PM
> Subject: Re: Tree of Smoke
>
>
> I like this better:
>
> "He closed his eyes and he turned his head and raised one hand to
> fend away that which could not be fended away. Chigurh shot him in
> the face. Everything that Wells had ever known or thought or loved
> drained slowly down the wall behind him. His mother's face, his First
> Communion, women he had known. The faces of men as they died on their
> knees before him. The body of a child dead in a roadside ravine in
> another country. He lay half headless on the bed with his arms
> outflung, most of his right hand missing. Chigurh rose and picked up
> the empty casing off the rug and blew into it and put it in his
> pocket and looked at his watch. The new day was still a minute away."
>
>    --off camera from McCarthy's _No Country_
>
> On Nov 18, 2007, at 7:02 AM, Monte Davis wrote:
>
> "From all around came the ten thousand sounds of the jungle, as well
> as the
> cries of gulls and the far-off surf, and if [Bill] stopped dead and
> listened
> a minute, he could hear also the pulse snickering in the heat of his
> flesh,
> and the creak of sweat in his ears."
>
>
>
>
>
>