Its a complex question, tweezing apart the Biblical tropes in McCarthy — but Zimmerman seems to be suggesting a larger question anyway. The fatalistic aspect in McCarthy is always tied to our shared existence. In Blood Meridian the national crime of the genocide of native americans is the spectre haunting the entire book. Judge Holden is, in many ways, much like chigurh. We cannot escape, for he is us. Moss is treated as a good man, but one who could not escape the collective crime of filthy lucre and its reified power to dominate our existence. Advanced capital if you will. Moss is not seen as a thief…..for such a reductive notion is almost meaningless in a McCarthy landscape anyway. He is a traveler through the ante chamber of hell — one he simply could not escape. His life before the finding of the money was only an extended delaying of his (our) fate.

The sheriff sees this clearly at the end. Resistance on the level of “crime fighting” is futile. Zimmerman approaches this in a fascinating fashion, albeit a bit different than I am suggesting. But the idea that Moss simply wants to be a rich man is rather to miss the bigger points — and to posit some idea that he is jeapordizing his wife is really to miss the point. This isnt a liberal fable about responsibility. That might float in typical Hollywood film, in fact it does. But it is exactly the deconstructing of such causal reasoning that McCarthy is looking at. McCarthy is the heir to Melville and No Country is maybe his finest book in fact.