An Indeterminate World

Cormac McCarthy, a distinguished contemporary American novelist and playwright, has created many remarkable works that are deemed comparable with those by Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Mark Twain and William Faulkner. One of his most prominent masterpieces is the novel No Country for Old Men (2005). Set in the U.S.-Mexico border area in the 1980s, it tells a "hide-and-seek" story between the old policeman Bell, the hunter Moss and the killer Chigurh as a result of a large sum of money left in a gunfight scene of drug trafficking. Multiple narrative techniques and plain colloquial language are adopted in the novel to depict the bloody violence and present a bleak and chaotic state of the society at that time in a subtle and profound way, thus revealing the negative side of humanity and the absurdness of the society. To put it another way, this work is a mirror of the U.S.-Mexico border area and even the society at that time, reflecting people’s contradictory and perplexed spiritual world as well as the whole out-of-order and chaotic society, wherein all norms about traditional society and ethics familiar to people turn indeterminate.Indeterminacy is an essential feature of postmodernism, which is further reflected in concepts, like ambiguity, deformation and pluralism. As Hassan states, "Indeterminacies pervade our actions, ideas, interpretations; they constitute the world." Therefore, analyzing the indeterminacy in modern literary works can help see through the surface and perceive the real artistic and realistic characteristics more exactly. This thesis is intended to focus on the narrative strategies and characterization, such as indeterminate language, nonlinear narrative structure and ambiguous characters, and explore how McCarthy adopts these narrative approaches to construct an indeterminate world in the book, thus unmasking the real life and mental state of people in the U.S.-Mexico border area. Furthermore, analysis will be made to explore the causes of indeterminacy behind the story and its realistic significance, combining the intensive textual reading with investigation of historical and social background in the 1980s and beyond, and to reflect how indeterminacy has dominated our world and pervaded our life.