No Country for Old Men Chapters VII & VIII Summary & Analysis

Chapters VII & VIII

Summary: Chapter VII

Bell declares he doesn’t want to talk about his time in the war when he lost his squad. He offers a teacher survey to demonstrate how life has changed in the country. Teachers once said the biggest problem they faced was kids misbehaving, but now they say things like rape and murder.

Chigurh uses the stairs to gain access to the office of the man who hired Wells. Standing in the hallway, he sees from the man’s shadow that the man is holding a pistol, but Chigurh shoots him in the throat before he can fire. Chigurh identifies himself, and the man dies.

Carla Jean and her mother head to the bus station to go to El Paso. The mother complains and says that Carla Jean never had a dream about Moss.

Chigurh breaks into the mother’s empty house. He searches their belongings and takes two of Carla Jean’s photographs. He spends the night and showers. After sorting through the mail and studying a phone bill, Chigurh opens a desk drawer and pulls out more mail to examine.

Moss takes a cab to retrieve the briefcase, carefully avoiding the guards. Afterward, he goes to San Antonio, where he buys a gun and a pickup truck and checks out his wounds. As Moss is getting on the highway, he picks up a teenage hitchhiker. He has her drive so he can sleep, but the pain keeps him awake. She asks Moss if he is running from the law, and he doesn’t deny it.

Bell returns a call from Carla Jean. She wants Bell to promise that if she shares where “he” called from, Bell won’t harm him.

In a trailer, two men listen on a headset and write something down. They then head to a Plymouth Barracuda armed with a submachine gun.

Summary: Chapter VIII

Bell muses on the county’s nine unsolved homicides. The drug dealers don’t care about the law and have no respect for the Sheriff. Bell wonders if Satan came up with drugs to destroy humanity. He leans toward believing in Satan as a valid explanation for the otherwise inexplicable.

Moss and the hitchhiker stop in a diner. She asks questions about the case and his injury, but he avoids direct answers, though later he acknowledges that someone might be after him. Moss gives the girl $1,000 for her journey to California. She hopes to start over, but Moss asserts that you can’t escape yourself. They joke about being outlaws.

At a motel in Van Horn, Moss gets two rooms, and later they sit on the steps drinking beer. He tells her he is married and on his way to El Paso to escape the people he stole from. The girl believes she was lucky to meet him. Moss tells her to catch a bus from El Paso to California. She makes an implied offer of sex, but he rejects her.

The Barracuda pulls into a carwash. The driver gets out, looks at the blood-streaked window, then washes the car before driving off.

Driving along the same road as the Barracuda, Bell sees a burning car. He arrives at the Van Horn motel to find police cars in the parking lot. The local sheriff explains there has been a shootout. A woman is dead and two men are injured. A witness reports that a Mexican man had grabbed a woman, and a man came out of his room with a gun. The Mexican shot them both with a machine gun, and the man shot back. Bell looks at a Barracuda in the parking lot. Then he goes to the hospital and learns one man has died. He identifies Moss despite the holes in his face but doesn’t recognize the woman. He knows Carla Jean will believe her husband cheated on her. Later, feeling puzzled, Bell drives back to the motel.

Chigurh returns to the motel when the police cars are gone. He enters a room and finds the case of money in the air duct. Back in his truck, he is about to turn on the engine when he sees Bell’s cruiser pull in. Bell goes into the room Chigurh just vacated. Seeing the open air duct and the broken door lock, he figures Chigurh was here. He drives away and calls the sheriff’s office. The deputies search but find nothing.

The next day Bell breaks the news to Carla Jean. She collapses to the floor and threatens to shoot him if he keeps saying he’s sorry.

Analysis: Chapters VII & VIII

In Chapter VII, readers see Chigurh and Moss set themselves on opposing courses, with the expectation that in some way, those paths will cross. Chigurh goes about exacting revenge on those who went against him, or as he would put it, he sets about bringing about the fate that they chose. Moss, for his part, is doing his best to escape with the money and his wife. Moss doesn’t know it, but in addition to Chigurh, he is also being chased by hitmen hired by the drug dealers. It seems that Moss is on a collision course to meet either or both of his enemies face to face. The big question is, who, if anyone, will emerge.

Because far more attention has been focused on Chigurh—and because the other hitmen sent after Moss were killed by Chigurh—most readers will expect a shootout or at least a confrontation between Chigurh and Moss. That expectation is dashed in Chapter VIII when readers learn that the Mexican hitmen got to Moss first. This chapter centers on his death, but this crucial moment proves to be anticlimactic. While the narration has been right at Moss’s side for most of this novel, McCarthy shares the news of Moss’s death secondhand, through a witness. Readers are unable to experience this event and its impact for themselves and instead are forced to rely on another character’s observations to try to understand and synthesize what happened. In many ways, Moss’s death is truly shocking. Not only was he a central character—many readers may have perceived him as the central character—but his death also represents evil’s victory. Further, the narration has led readers to anticipate the dramatic clash between Moss and Chigurh, but the two men never even meet. Instead, the foes who have been lurking in the background, the ones who have never been a main part of the story, are the ones who succeed in taking down the wily Moss.

As with the character of Wells, McCarthy introduces a new character, the unnamed hitchhiker, only to kill her off quickly. This character, too, allows readers to find out more about the main characters. Through Moss’s conversations with the hitchhiker, readers learn that he remains true to his wife and content with the woman he chose to be his partner. This knowledge puts Carla Jean’s betrayal of his location to Bell in a different light. If Carla Jean had continued to have the faith in him that she had earlier professed, perhaps the Mexicans and Chigurh—who uses the information he gained about Carla Jean’s telephone calls from the house—would never have discovered Moss’s location.

The hitchhiker also gives McCarthy the chance to explore how characters perceive luck, fate, and choice. The hitchhiker believes she was lucky to get a ride with Moss, but this very ride led to her death. However, her choice to leave home and hitchhike with Moss factored into her death as well. Similarly, Moss acknowledges that it was his act of stealing the money that brought him to this present state. Moss is a manifestation of what he told the hitchhiker earlier, that you can never have a fresh start because you always carry your past deeds with you.

Bell plays a larger role in Chapter VIII than in Chapter VII. He witnesses the carnage of the murders through Moss’s disfigured face and shows that he speaks from experience when he says that drug dealers don’t care about the law. As seen through the numerous gun battles in the book, the drug dealers and their henchmen have gone from carrying out their violence in relatively private areas, like an isolated floodplain or a car on a desolate road, to murder in public spaces trafficked by everyday people, like hotels and the streets of Eagle Pass. They act without compunction, and with each successive murder, they grow bolder.

These chapters also present some short scenes that raise more questions than they answer. At the end of Chapter VII, two men drive off with a submachine gun in a Plymouth Barracuda. In Chapter VIII the driver of a Barracuda has been involved in some sort of bloody violence, and there’s also a Barracuda in the parking lot. While this hardly seems a coincidence, McCarthy provides no satisfactory answer to whether these are different or the same Barracudas. What these Barracudas are doing and who they belong to, readers of No Country for Old Men have to decide for themselves.