"[T]here wasnt going to be any other shot": Classical and Christian Hamartia in No Country for Old Men

Abstract: No Country for Old Men opens with a missed shot, an instance of hamartia , Greek for "missing the mark." Hamartia is the term Aristotle uses for the error that undoes the tragic hero. McCarthy thus encourages a reading of his seeming thriller as tragedy and casts the novel's protagonist, Sheriff Bell, as himself a tragic figure. What's more, the novel begins with Bell's decision to abandon his post, a choice framed by his meditations on evil, not error. Significantly, hamartia is the New Testament word for sin. I thus read the novel as a Christian tragedy that examines both moral agency and failures of faith, and in so doing, counters the determinist teachings of the diabolical sinner, Anton Chigurh.