Death and the Search for Heideggerian Authenticity in No Country for Old Men

This article explores intersections between Martin Heidegger’s existentialist theories of death and authenticity and Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. Scholars have located existentialist strains in McCarthy’s literature, but this article offers a new reading of Anton Chigurh’s role as an embodiment of both death and the search for authentic existence. Working against the critical consensus that Chigurh’s dialogues with his victims are grounded on a desire to provoke them to a deeper understanding of their situations, I argue that Chigurh is actually trying to bring about an existentialist understanding of death for himself. In Heidegger’s Being and Time, such an understanding involves breaking free of societal views that treat death as a threat consigned to a distant future and embracing mortality as a possibility that is at once certain, indefinite, and intrinsic to one’s existence.