No Country for Old Men Chapter IV Summary & Analysis

Chapter IV

Summary: Chapter IV

Bell talks about becoming sheriff when he was only twenty-five, after returning from the war. He served two terms, and then he and his wife moved away, but he wanted to return and run for sheriff again. Bell’s wife Loretta agreed for his sake. She’s the best person, he knows and he considers himself lucky to have her. They also lost a daughter.

At Moss’s trailer, Bell and Wendell find the broken lock. As they walk through, they realize that Moss and his wife have left town. Bell expects that Moss knows the kind of people who are after him. By Wednesday, the murders are making the news. Various state and federal agencies arrive to investigate.

Back at the first motel, Moss asks for another room directly behind his original room. In the new room, he uses a makeshift pole to fish down the ventilation shaft and hook the bag. He takes a stack of money and then puts the bag and the pole back in the duct before leaving.

Following a signal from the transponder, Chigurh first drives, then walks, past the motel rooms. He kicks open the door of one of the rooms and shoots the two Mexican men inside. Then he searches for the bag and opens the duct, spotting the marks where Moss dragged it through the dust. He cleans his clothes of blood and leaves.

In his office, Bell reads a report on the man in the trunk. He figures out that Chigurh’s weapon is an air-powered gun with a steel bolt, like a cattle gun.

Moss takes a cab to a hotel in Eagle Pass. After some thought, he rifles through the money and finds the transponder, which he puts in a drawer. Moss takes out his shotgun and turns on the shower, knowing that he will never be safe again, then goes downstairs and offers the clerk $100 to call him if anyone checks in. Several hours later Moss wakes up and listens. Hiding under the bed with his gun, he sees a man enter. After asking the intruder what he wants and receiving no answer, Moss gets to his feet, grabs the money bag, and forces the man down the hall with him. Then Moss runs down the stairs and outside. Chigurh fires from the hotel balcony, hitting Moss. As Moss shoots back, a car pulls up, and men get out with machine guns blazing. Moss returns fire. He limps along, feeling ill, as he hears gunfire behind him. He crosses the bridge into Mexico, buying a man’s coat to conceal his bloody clothing. Moss hurls the money bag over the railing into the cane plants bordering the river. In Mexico, he offers an old man money to find him a doctor.

Chigurh, bleeding from a gunshot to the leg, exchanges fire with the men in the car. The gun battle ends when Chigurh shoots the last man and watches as he dies. Then he limps back to his car.

Analysis: Chapter IV

Bell’s only role in this chapter is to identify Chigurh’s mysterious weapon: a gun much like those used to kill cattle. This analogy emphasizes that Chigurh doesn’t see his victims as people at all, but rather as non-thinking beings that must be put down for a reason, the reason being that they got in his way. However, the weapon also seems unbearably odd and cruel. In fact, of the several men Chigurh kills in this chapter, one murder is particularly grisly as he takes the time to watch the man die. While no clear explanation of this is given, Chigurh likely wants the man to see the instrument of his death, or perhaps Chigurh even enjoys the moment that a person ceases to exist.

The reason Bell figures so little in this chapter is that the focus here is on the chase of Moss, which picks up in intensity. The narrative cuts back and forth between Moss and Chigurh as if narrowing the distance between them. The tension picks up as readers see that Chigurh has something that Moss doesn’t know about—the transponder. It becomes inevitable that these two men will meet. The suspense builds because readers know that Moss is in the motel room, getting the money and preparing to leave. Moss has stayed one step ahead of Chigurh the whole time, but it seems like his luck is about to run out. Yet when Chigurh busts into the room, he does not surprise Moss but two Mexicans, who presumably work for a drug lord. Readers have been so focused on Chigurh as Moss’s enemy that they likely forgot—even though Moss pointed it out in Chapter III—that at least two groups of criminals are after him and the money, not just Chigurh. This recollection is ultimately anticlimactic, however. Chigurh kills the men at the moment that readers are introduced to them. Further, Moss manages to leave the hotel while Chigurh is focused on the wrong room. Chigurh, who has shown himself to be an almost superhuman killer, has been let down and led astray by technology, which Bell had disparaged earlier in Chapter III.

When Moss finally discovers the transponder in the money while in Eagle Pass, a curious thing happens. Instead of leaving right away without the transponder, he stays in the room, knowing that Chigurh eventually will show up at his door. While McCarthy provides no definitive answer as to why Moss makes this choice, he does leave clues to allow readers to infer their own explanations. One possibility is that because Moss thinks he can’t outrun those coming after him, he wants to meet that danger head-on and end it. Moss seems intent on killing whoever is following him. Yet when the moment and Chigurh arrive, Moss simply threatens him to stay behind and then runs away. It seems as if either he has lost his nerve, perhaps because he did not get the expected warning call, or he has changed his mind about killing another person. The latter explanation makes sense, given Moss’s past as a soldier in Vietnam.

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