Tom McGee's Blog

Over at the Cor­mac McCarthy Soci­ety, the good old boys are hash­ing over the use of the num­bers 1:17 in McCarthy’s last two books. In “The Road,” it’s when the clocks stop. In “No Coun­try For Old Men,” it shows up a few times, as the time on the mon­strous killer’s dash­board clock, and as “117,” the hotel room where a mur­der occurs.

The lead­ing Bib­li­cal can­di­dates talked about include Rev. 1:17, “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. Then he placed his right hand on me and said: “Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last.”

This fits Chiguhr (the bad guy in NCFOM) pretty well. At one point he lays his hand on a man’s fore­head “like a faith healer” while killing him. Maybe also relates to the kid in The Road, he’s com­pared to a god sev­eral times.

Oth­ers bring up Peter 1:17 (even though there is no such thing, it should be 1 Peter or 2 Peter), Gen­e­sis 1:17, some of the gospels…but these are not con­vinc­ing, they feel like they’re des­per­ately try­ing to pull some kind of mean­ing of a ran­dom pas­sage. Oth­ers try for a date lineup on Jan­u­ary 17, some saint’s day. Doesn’t click.

I’ve got a bet­ter one.

“The Road” starts out with a dream of a mon­ster deep in a cave, and is about a cat­a­clysm of source unknown which wipes out all life; “No Coun­try” has as its antag­o­nist a soul­less man who comes from nowhere and deals death to vir­tu­ally every­one he meets.

Just move the colon in Rev. 1:17 and you get Rev. 11:7, which reads:

“Now when they have fin­ished their tes­ti­mony, the beast that comes up from the Abyss will attack them, and over­power and kill them.”

Per­fect fit. I’d like to let the homies know, but their bulletin-board soft­ware is return­ing a SQL error. I could prob­a­bly help them out with that, too.