Abstract
“That is no country for old men” is the famous first line of Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” which reflects upon aging, art, and immortality. Yeats suggests in his poem that the aged ought to move from the sensual, physical world of their youth to a world of intellect and timeless beauty. We employ this poem and that line to explore the aging male protagonists in two recent novels: Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men, and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. We suggest that though both of the novel’s protagonists have aspirations to ’sail to Byzantium’, various factors ranging from their characters to the problematic realities of contemporary southwest America and South Africa make such a wholesale, successful journey impossible even though some progress is made.
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