No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men Irony

"I just didn't want you to get blood on the car" (Verbal Irony)

On page seven, when Anton Chigurh pulls a man over after stealing a police cruiser, the man steps out of his car and Chigurh kills him with the cattlegun. Then, Chigurh says to the dead heap at his feet, "I just didn't want you to get blood on the car" (7) as a way of explaining why he had him go to the trouble of stepping out of the car. This dark attempt at humor on Chigurh's part, a little joke to himself, qualifies as verbal irony in the sense that for all the logistical reasons to kill the man outside of the car, and for all the moral reasons not to kill him at all, he cites the most insignificant reason for his actions—cleanliness.

"Maybe their television was broke" (Verbal Irony)

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell describes a recent wave of senseless violence and gives a specific example of a couple in California who would torture and kill the elderly. He says, "Here last week they found this couple out in California they would rent out rooms to old people and then kill em and bury em in the yard and cash their social security checks. They’d torture em first, I dont know why. Maybe their television was broke" (124). Ed Tom, trying to make sense of these absolutely senseless acts which likely have deep, psychological or traumatic roots for the perpetrators, offers up the explanation that maybe their television was broken and that they were bored and looking for a source of entertainment. He employs verbal irony here to emphasize the ills of a media-driven society.

"It's full of money" (Dramatic Irony)

When Llewelyn returns home from the scene of the cartel massacre with the briefcase, Carla Jean asks him what's in it and he casually replies, "It's full of money." She doesn't believe him and replies, "Yeah. That'll be the day" (20). The irony of this scene is dramatic in the sense that both the reader and Llewelyn know that there actually is money in the briefcase—2.4 million dollars to be exact. But Carla Jean has no idea that this is the case because of how casually Llewelyn dispenses the information.

Chigurh gets T-boned (Situational Irony)

Toward the end of the novel, after Chigurh kills Carla Jean and makes his uncharacteristically verbose monologue about fate and destiny, posing himself as an agent of fate, Chigurh is T-boned by a car full of teenagers at a country intersection and gravely injured. This is situational irony in the sense that Chigurh has demonstrated throughout the novel and especially in his encounter with Carla Jean that he is somehow exempt from death and chaos; right at the hight of that delusion of grandeur, he is randomly hit by a car.