"Art becomes an attunement to the demonic": Confronting the Hyperobject in McCarthy's No Country for Old Men

Abstract

The protagonist of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, Sheriff Bell, says or thinks “I dont know” or some variation of it around sixty times, a striking fact that has been largely overlooked in McCarthy scholarship. This study attempts to illuminate Bell’s refrain of “I don’t know” by analyzing the drug plague in the novel as what Timothy Morton’s object-oriented ontology calls a “hyperobject.” Reading the drug scourge as hyperobject and the villain Anton Chigurh as its avatar allows us to gain insight into the patterns of hypocrisy, weakness, and lameness in the novel’s characters.