Amy Sexton
Professor Nycole Rochford
English 101
12/08/13
Deadly Doers
The theme of death can be a challenging topic for some writers to master, however, two such stories in which the authors were successful is conveying the theme of death without the story being daunting are, No Country for Old Men (Cormac
McCarthy) and A Good Man Is Hard to Find (Flannery O'Connor) . The two authors convey death in their stories in similar context that are parallel to each other but also different as well.
The parallel similarities that in both stories is how death actually occurs in these two stories. Both McCarthy and O’Connor utilize an antagonist who is a type of the story in which they take the lives of every day human beings that cross the paths of these almost devilish killers. Anton Chugarh, in No Country for Old Men, is hit man hired to find a package of money that was taken at a crime scene and in A Good Man is Hard to
Find, a man who is self-proclaimed as The Misfit, escapes from jail and murders a family in cold blood only because he was looking for some clothes to wear. In these stories, both of the antagonists seem to have an internal struggle with their murderous hobby, but only for one bat of an eye lash.
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Anton Chugarh has two moments in No Country for Old Men where he appears to be questioning his morals and his belief of “fate.” The first moment is when he catches up to Carson Wells, his old associate and hired hit man to hunt down Chugarh.
Craftily, Anton was able to sneak up on Wells and hold him up at gun point and in this scene Anton seems to be questioning the rules of fate with the question he proposes to
Wells, 'If the rule you follow brought you to this, of what use was the rule?' The question is rather an insightful question, is there truly one rule that a person can abide by to such a point that the rule could actually bring affirmation to the story of their whole life?, which I believe that