Ed Tom Bell’s Outlook

From his soliloquies, Ed Tom Bell seems to see crime and law as two unstoppable forces of nature that always balance and never go away. He realizes that he can never get rid of crime, only control it. Bell seems like he’s seen everything and there is nothing that will shock him anymore. He notices a new breed of criminals like Chigurh and knows the police will have to adapt to deal with them. In the soliloquy at the beginning of the third chapter, Bell talks about how advances in technology don’t help the police because the criminals use new technology to counter it. It seems like a metaphor for his view on the struggle between criminals and law enforcement as a whole. From these windows into Bell’s thought process, he seems like a former optimist whose point of view has been warped by the terrible things he has seen. The Bell we see in No Country for Old Men has been hardened and simply accepts the grizzly nature of the real world with the knowledge that he has little power to change it. He longs for the older and simpler days of law enforcement where the crimes weren’t as brutal.