A "symbol", in a literary sense, is an object in the story
that represents something else, such as a dove representing peace, or a child's doll
representing innocence.
The two most glaring symbols I can
think of in No Country For Old Men are both carried by the
antagonist, Anton Chigurh: the coin, and the bolt gun he uses to kill his victims and
enter buildings.
The coin he uses to determine whether a
potential victim will live or die, believing he surrenders his will as a killer to the
will of the coin. It is a symbol of random chance, in my opinion, that a coin could
find its way to Chigurh and then to his victims by pure random paths, their deaths
reduced to a coin flip, as random as if they were hit by a bus or killed in
war.
The bolt gun, actually called a Captive Bolt Gun, used
to kill cattle, is instead used by Chigurh to murder humans. I believe McCarthy
intended it to be a symbol of slaughter, in this case not of cows, but of men, and in
the same manner as cattle - dehumanized, their value reduced to that of mere
animals.
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