Inevitability Of Tragedy

Cormac McCarthy is one of the most extraordinary novelists of America,he is also called"the most prominent hermit in American Literary since Salinger."Violence and cruelty can be regarded as the dominant theme of his works. In No Country for Old Men, however, besides the continuity of his famous theme of violence and cruelty, McCarthy further explores the root of all the violence and brutality. By using Lacan's Desire Theory, this paper intends to analyze the necessary connection between the border area and frontier people's destinies to draw the conclusion of the inevitability and irreversibility of their tragic endings. Under McCarthy's pen, the border area is the combination of blood,violence,grotesque. Living in such world, people suffers from mental illness without knowing it. They just pay futile efforts to change their current situation, chasing after what they thought they want. However, besides desire's unsatisfiability, the desire itself forms in this twisted society is alienated and distorted. All the struggles and fights against their tragic ending of these common people are just in vain.The main body of the thesis consists of three parts. Chapter One analsizes the desire is the desire of lack, concluding that desire can never be satisfied which decides three protagonists'final tragedies. Chapter Two focuses on the importance of Other's recognition. The false recognitions they finally won lead to their inevitable tragic endings. Chapter Three mainly deals with the outside world. Under this distorted and disordered social environment, nobody can live happily ever after. Through the depict of the disordered postmodern society and the lawless American-Mexico border area, the author intends to demonstrate the strong sense of losing control of every character in the book, from three protagonists to common people, indicating the powerlessness of all walks of life in the inevitable social trend of moral degeneration nowadays.