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In McCarthy’s first few soliloquies, many things are revealed about Ed Tom Bell. From these, my perception of Bell is that he’s very involved in his job, which deals with law and crime. A major theme throughout the soliloquies is law enforcement and capital punishment. In the first one, he reflects on how he sent a kid to the gas chamber for killing a young girl. In the second one, he’s reflecting on his law enforcement work in the past compared to work now and the third one talks about new technology in law enforcement, along with the impact new technology has had. I think he talks about law enforcement in all of them because it shows us insight into past events in his job and some of the things he’s been through. One part of the second one I thought was interesting was when he showed insight into his thoughts of a different race. Bell talks about how he had to stop the truck because it had Coahuila plates. This reveals that Bell is racist towards Mexicans. Also, in the third one, there was a part where he talks in a racist way about Hoskins.

I think that McCarthy decided to include the soliloquies because it shows the point of view of Bell and how he feels about events that happened in the past and everything that’s happened to him.

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.

Ed Tom Bell does not seem to be a fan of all the aspects of being a sheriff. Bell is content with a small town sheriff job where most cop calls end with a fist fight or an arrest. However, when the small town has a series of violent murderous cases, Bell conveys the idea that he is in a danger zone. In the third soliloquy Bell states that he does not know how to handle the situation with Chigurh because he has never had to deal with a murder on a killing spree. Bell sticks to his set of morals throughout the soliloquies and tries to avoid death to the best of his ability. This is exemplified in the first soliloquy, Bell does not enjoy the idea of putting the boy to death and he wrestles with the decision years later.

I think that McCarthy includes the soliloquies to give another point of view. The book is based from two insights the criminals and the cops; by providing insight into the two viewpoints he can create two story lines around the same plot. The soliloquies also tell the reader that each character lives by there own set of morals and the soliloquies compares Chigurh’s morals to Bell’s morals.

Bell’s Morals: At the end of the first soliloquy of the novel Sheriff Bell states that he will not “put his soul at hazard.” Earlier he had stated that he was willing to sacrifice his life on duty. I would assume that putting one’s soul at hazard most nearly means committing some sort of grievous sin, for example, killing someone. This action of manslaughter seems to be an essential aspect of working in law enforcement and Bell even recognizes it as such. One could argue that willingness to kill, “what you are willing to become,” makes an effective sheriff, and it seems that Bell agrees, however, he is still unwilling to sacrifice his morals for this cause.

Foreshadowing and character establishing in the soliloquies: Each soliloquy teaches us more about Bell such as his morals, his experiences while keeping the peace, and the differences between law enforcement in Bell’s past and the complex criminal circumstances he currently faces. Related to the last point, in the second soliloquy he juxtaposes breaking up minor crimes by engaging in fist fights in his early sheriff days with being shot at by vehicle-occupying Mexican drug cartel members in his more recent years. Obviously, Bell longs for his early days when he could smack ruffians into submission. The part one soliloquy also foreshadows Anton Chigurh’s impending rampage with the line “But he wasn’t nothin compared to what was comin down the pike.”

It is apparent that Ed Tom Bell has been a sheriff for a long time. At first glance, he comes off like he’s has seen it all. Bell says to become a Sheriff, you have to be willing to die. There is one part of his job, however, that he isn’t willing to accept–putting his soul at hazard. We hear his say this at the beginning of the novel, and don’t think much of it. As we keep reading and get to each soliloquy, it becomes more apparent that Bell fears killing. He fears the act of killing someone himself, even when it is needed. He becomes uncomfortable and contemplative over the gas chamber and you can see that despite his experience, he doesn’t know how to deal with mass killers like Chigurth. Not only that, he fears them and hopes he doesn’t want to come in contact with them again, after his encounter with the young man who killed his girlfriend. This fear carries with him through the novel as is apparent when he is investigating the trucks out in the country. He is almost astonished at the crimes he is coming across and you can feel his uncomfortableness in the text.

Bell is racist towards Mexicans. We know this because in one of the soliloquies he said “they had Coahuila plates on it and I thought, well I need to stop these old boys and take a look.” This shows his racism since he thought that he “had” to stop them since they had Mexican plates. This shows that he does not trust Mexicans and how he thinks they are all bad and sketchy. In the text it also shows more racism about Mexicans.

I think McCarthy adds in these soliloquies because he wants us to get to know Bell and have a look into how his mind works. I also think this shows how these past experiences have shaped his morales and how he works. Bell also uses these experiences to classify the criminals he has apprehended and how he is trying to see if Chigurh fits under one of those classifications or if he is a new class of criminal. It also seems like this notion scares him because he is so used to the classes and how to deal with them and that if there is this new threat how is he going to deal with it and how it’ll pan out.

a) Within Bell’s Soliloquies, the reader is opened to a side to him that we can’t see from other characters in the novel. In his first soliloquy, he reveals his fear of the living prophet of destruction. It shows a vulnerable side of him which shows a fear that accompanies him throughout his career as a sheriff. Later in his second soliloquy, he points out how you never know what you are going to come across in his field and it shows how he lives within his fear of coming across a man of destruction at any moment. It shows that even though he seems fearless by facing his fear everyday, everyone has worries that people may not realize. It reveals that even as the Sheriff, Bell can feel exposed as well and this idea of a person of destruction could foreshadow to events later in the novel.

b) I think McCarthy adds these soliloquies to add a depth to the story and the culture behind it. Through Bell’s perspective, the readers can understand the culture of police officers in general in Texas in the 1980’s along with their run ins with the Mexican drug cartel. Bell offers an insight on the dangers of the country and the psychological burdens of seeing so much crime and he discusses some dehumanization in the process of exterminating criminals. As an officer facing so many people with unmoral intentions, they are exposed to different views to the world that few people could ever imagine.

“I don’t know” is one of Ed Tom Bell’s most frequent phrases used throughout this novel so far. He became a sheriff at the age of twenty-five, so he has been in law enforcement for his whole life, so he should know the twist and turns within the crime department. 

McCarthy really constructed Bell into an older sheriff that doesn’t understand the crime he is dealing with in the novel. With each italicized section, Bell comments on how he doesn’t know if law enforcement work is more dangerous now than it used to be, doesn’t know if law enforcement benefits from new technology, and he comments on how he reads the newspaper every morning to try and get an idea of the problems he is dealing with. McCarthy makes Bell out to be a sheriff that is trying to catch the drug-runners, but in the end really has no chance due to his deficiency of knowledge in the crime present in the novel. 

Bell seems to be the kind of man that is labeled “traditional”, hence living in a small town in the South, being a sheriff in a small town, married young, and seems to have some harsh comments towards other races. His character is very sheltered and not knowing of the new up-coming problems that are happening within this novel, and he is slowly realizing that. 

In Part Three of “No Country for Old Men,” Sheriff Bell talks about how he thinks Law Enforcement doesn’t benefit all that much from new technologies. But the part that interested me was the ending of his soliloquies, where talks about the Sheriffs of old. Like Jim Scarborough who according to Bell never carried a sidearm. Sheriffs like that, Bell seems to hold in high regard. Bell also uses guns used by old sheriffs, Like a Colt Single Action Army or a Winchester 1897. Finally, Bell also visits old-timers to hear their stories of a different time, a different west than the one Sheriff Bell is in. Bell holds this vision in his head, from what I’ve read in this soliloquy, of the Old West of those Sheriffs who never had to fire their guns because people were good in his head. He venerates them. From the equipment, to the sentimentalities of the West that never existed. The West that Bell seems to know is a fabrication. The Old West was cruel to people, no matter who you were. The West Bell knows only existed in the stories told after the fact, when the person last left standing was the Hero in their stories, where it was Wholesome, compared to the grit that we have the knowledge of today. Bell seems to want to go back to this West, even though the West he wants isn’t going to happen. He’s on the present, where in this country, there isn’t room for old men.

My perception of the novel’s Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is that he is a longtime sheriff that has arrested and dealt with many different criminals during his career. Because of this, Ed Tom Bell is really a storyteller, he tells his stories in both the soliloquies and the main narrative. He narrates his soliloquies in the same tone as his character in the text. The purpose of the soliloquies I think are two-fold. On one hand, Ed Tom Bell is almost foreshadowing the chapter ahead. In his soliloquy in chapter one, Ed Tom Bell says “Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I don’t want to confront him.” On the very next page, Chigurh kills the Ed Tom Bell’s deputy without any thought of remorse. The second reason is to show more insight into Ed Tom Bell’s life and experience. In the second soliloquy Ed Tom Bell talks about his run in with criminals in the past, providing us with insights of how Ed Tom Bell will react in future chapters, and in the third, he talks about firearms and his opinions on them, as guns seem a fairly major motifs present in the novel.