No Country for Old Men: Four Challenges for Men Facing the Fourth Age

This essay reads the protagonist of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men (2005), Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, as an exemplar of problems that contemporary aging men face when they look to ahead to the so-called Fourth Age. As the plot unfolds, Bell is an aging, increasingly ineffectual cowboy lawman who retires, renounces the violence that sustained his male dominance, and loses the moral certainty that ensured his identity. Like Bell, most old men struggle with four interrelated challenges as they move along the ever-lengthening journey of life: relevance, masculinity, love, and meaning.