This thesis deals with the presentation of violence in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men. The work analyses the dynamics of violence between the main characters of the aforementioned novels; the kid and judge Holden from Blood Meridian and Anton Chigurh and sheriff Ed Tom Bell from No Country for Old Men. The analysis focuses on the different characteristics of the violence of the novels’ characters, bearing in mind both the importance of novels’ background themes such as Manifest Destiny, colonialization and imperialism of the USA, fencing of the West, the rule of law, masculinity and desire for power, renunciation of violence, the changing reality of the contemporary American society, greed and lack of moral; as well as the different time periods in which the action of the two novels is taking place. I organized my analysis first on the characteristics of violence of Blood Meridian’s characters and the novel itself, after which I passed on to No Country for Old Men analyzing the issue at hand and comparing the similarities and differences between the two.