One of the themes in the story involves the tension between destiny and self-determination. According to Richard Gillmore, the main characters are torn between a sense of inevitability, "that the world goes on its way and that it does not have much to do with human desires and concerns", and the notion that our futures are inextricably connected to our own past actions.[33] Enda McCaffrey details a character who refuses to acknowledge his own agency, noting that Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) ignores repeated reminders that he doesn't have to behave as he does and suggesting that by relegating the lives of Carla and the gas station clerk to a coin toss, he hands "responsibility over to 'fate' in an act of bad faith that prevents him from taking responsibility for his own ethical choices."[84]
Not only behavior, but position alters. One of the themes developed in the story is the shifting identity of hunter and hunted. Scott Foundas stresses that everyone in the film plays both roles,[85] while Judie Newman focuses on the moments of transition, when hunter Llewelyn Moss and investigator Wells become themselves targets.[86]
The story contrasts old narratives of the "Wild West" with modern crimes, suggesting that the heroes of old can at best hope to escape from rather than to triumph over evil. William J. Devlin explores the narrative of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, an aging Western hero, symbolic of an older tradition, who does not serve an underpopulated "Wild West", but an evolved landscape with new breeds of crime which baffle him.[87] William Luhr focuses on the perspective of the retiring lawman played by Tommy Lee Jones at the beginning of the film, who is withdrawing from an evil which he cannot understand or address, reflecting the film's millennial worldview with "no hope for a viable future, only the remote possibility of individual detachment from it all."[88]
