Comparisons can also be made to William Faulkner’s Southern gothic prose in its themes of the paltry, transitory achievements of man and man’s inevitable fall from grace. No Country for Old Men also pays homage to several American fiction genres, such as the noir crime fiction of the 1950’s, with its spare prose, laconic characterizations, and meticulously described violence, as exemplified by Dashiell Hammett. These themes are also evident in McCarthy’s novel, and are particularly evident in Sheriff Ed Tom Bell’s lamentations-on the eve of his retirement-about the fallen, decayed society he finds himself protecting. The poem comments upon the transitory glories of youth and the flesh and the tragedy of the inevitable fall into old age and death. The title of the novel comes from the first line of the poem “Sailing to Byzantium” by William Butler Yeats.
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