In Cormac McCarthy’s book No Country for Old Men, there is a certain character that stands out from the rest of the characters. That character’s name is Anton Chigurh. Anton Chigurh is hired to retrieve the case of money that Llewellyn Moss took by any means necessary. Chigurh is described as a cold and calculated killer who will eliminate anybody that gets in his way. Even though Anton Chigurh kills, steals, and works for a leader of a drug gang, he possesses values, skills, and principles that are not present in even the good characters of the story such as Sheriff Ed Tom Bell and Llewellyn Moss. Anton Chigurh should not be labelled simply as the antagonist of the story but more as the necessary evil or a hired gun. Both Readers and writers
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It does not matter how hard a character tries, they cannot stop Chigurh from completing his job. The thing is, Chigurh accomplished what I always wanted to happen in a book or movie, it was for the bad guy to win. In almost every single movie that I have watched or book that I have read, it has the good guy win and the bad guy to win. That is not realistic and makes mystery books and movies predictable. What Chigurh does in the book is shed some cold-hard facts on literature, the good guy does not always win and that even main characters are not protected by plot armor, anyone at any time can either lose or die. While Chigurh’s aim is not as grand or extreme such as destroying the world, he had to do a job that involved breaking the law. He had a job and saw it to be completed by any means necessary. So while Chigurh, the antagonist won, it did not have any major repercussions on the world, the aftermath only affected a small town and a few people. If more plots had this idea where the bad guy wins, it would surprise readers and not have them think they are reading the same story repeatedly where the heroes always win. Readers at the beginning of a story would see that there is an antagonist and protagonist and would try to figure out who is going to
It does not matter how hard a character tries, they cannot stop Chigurh from completing his job. The thing is, Chigurh accomplished what I always wanted to happen in a book or movie, it was for the bad guy to win. In almost every single movie that I have watched or book that I have read, it has the good guy win and the bad guy to win. That is not realistic and makes mystery books and movies predictable. What Chigurh does in the book is shed some cold-hard facts on literature, the good guy does not always win and that even main characters are not protected by plot armor, anyone at any time can either lose or die. While Chigurh’s aim is not as grand or extreme such as destroying the world, he had to do a job that involved breaking the law. He had a job and saw it to be completed by any means necessary. So while Chigurh, the antagonist won, it did not have any major repercussions on the world, the aftermath only affected a small town and a few people. If more plots had this idea where the bad guy wins, it would surprise readers and not have them think they are reading the same story repeatedly where the heroes always win. Readers at the beginning of a story would see that there is an antagonist and protagonist and would try to figure out who is going to