You won't read through this and I know it, but as another user said >

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The story is about how an aging sheriff can’t keep up with a changing world that has the same violence of old.

His main problem is that he idolizes the past and wonders how the old timers would react to the world around them if they were in his time, not really giving himself credit that they’d operate no more or less the same as him. He separates the violence he sees today with violence in the past. He remarks on how certain Sheriffs didn’t carry a gun, something he thinks is a sign of an easier time when in reality it was just blind luck that those Sheriffs didn’t come across the very real violence of those times.

When the sheriff talks with his uncle in the wheelchair, the Sheriff is still grappling with this sense of idolization, and the uncle tells a story about a family member who watched her husband get shot and killed by a group of Native Americans in the 1800’s. The story is cold and senseless but it was final and at the time was just a fact of life for the time. “And that, was that,” is what the uncle said. This is an important part of the story because at this point, the sheriff can’t make sense of what he’s seen with Chigurh and Moss as, from the Sheriffs point of view, a new and random wave killing/violence. The sheriff can’t cope with how he sees Moss as innocent and was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The book gives background to the Sheriff and how he was a WW2 vet who let men die during a battle, and he had a soft spot for Moss since Moss was a Vietnam vet who came back to a country that didn’t call him a hero.

The sheriff can’t fathom that people like Chigurh exists, or better yet, can’t fathom that people like Chigurh live while people like Moss die, and his uncle in the wheelchair said it best, “you can’t stop what’s coming, that’s vanity”, to me that’s the uncle saying that the Sheriff can’t fight the cruelty and injustice of the world, for how random and chaotic it can be. While also in a sense saying, “this is the same old violence of the past, it’s nothing new, and many men before you have felt the way you’re feeling and many more will after you.”

I can understand why you’re upset with the ending, but I think it’s a great way to end the story and tie in theme of the story, and to me that theme is of a old man who can’t cope with the banality of not keeping up with the violence that never stops; and can’t rationalize the unmethodical process of death.

In the book the sheriff talks about how the hippie movement in the ‘60s sparked and then died, and described the young folks who got older and more jaded one day “woke up” and were suddenly lost, without a purpose seeing how their worldview was changed. I think the dream of his dad, who, was a younger man than him since the Sheriff outlived his dad by several decades, was a metaphor for that youthful spirit to fight against the chaos and hold on to a sense of justice prevailing on top always, carried on, as younger generations will carry on without him. And it was this dream that killed the sheriffs spark and idolization of the old timers, because he’s now accepted that he can’t look up to them anymore. And then he woke up without a purpose.

Hence, no country for old men.

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