Subversion And Reconstruction: A Postmodern Reading Of No Country For Old Men

No Country for Old Men makes a hybridization of the Western and crime fiction. It rewrites subversively some traditional items in these two genres of popular literature, and rebuilds them into brand-new appearances. The thesis, on the one hand, discusses the subversion and reconstruction of these traditional items including the set-up of riddle, the image of detective and criminal in crime literature and the western frontier and the image of cowboy in the Western literature. The novel’s fusing with the mass culture showcases the open postmodern spirit to popular culture.On the other hand, this thesis tries to analyze the postmodernity of the work from its style. The style in sections typed in upright letters in No Country for Old Men follows his previous writings. McCarthy, as an orthographer, subverts the dichotomy between signified and signifier, and reconstructs a world of symbols, the meanings behind which are not clear any more, a world hard to understand and full of mysteries. The writer also overthrows the conventional logical relationships in sentence structure, and reestablishes a democratic world of subject and object. At last, this novel subverts the normal novel text in the visual aspect through the unique type of print, and sets up a world in which the human subjectivity is gone. For a postmodernist writer, these text games exhibit the capabilities of dispelling the surface structure in stylistics.