Sheriff Bell’s Outdated Ways

Gabriel Pichinson

Mr. Salamon

AP English (Per. 3)

31 August 2015

Sheriff Bell’s Outdated Ways

        Ed Tom Bell, a local Texas sheriff, is an old but good-hearted man that tries his best to protect the citizens in his jurisdiction; but his methods are too outdated for the ever-evolving world and he quickly becomes irrelevant character in Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country For Old Men, as he fails to save the main character Llewellyn Moss at the end of the book.

        Since Tom Bell is just a local Texas Sheriff, he has had no need to evolve with society. He has never dealt with any major crimes and even explains that he “never had to kill nobody” (63).  His lack of experience with such crimes makes him incapable of dealing with them effectively. Despite the fact he works in the middle of the country, Bell still realizes that the world is advancing and recognizes that “it keeps gettin' harder”(40), because back in the old days he remembered when “some of the old time sheriffs wouldn’t even carry a firearm”(63). Although Bell does carry a gun he, still refuses to use any of the modern firearms; and he explains how he “likes the old Winchester” and that he likes “that it’s got a hammer” because he doesn’t “like havin' to hunt the safety on a gun” (62). Not only is Bell from an outdated generation, but that he refuses to try to evolve with the rest of the world, making him a useless sheriff.  If Bell hadn’t retired he would have surely been killed, because he has no idea how to handle the world he lives in today as a sheriff.

        Tom Bell not only had no idea what the world of crime was becoming, but he also had no potential to evolve with it either. Bell had grown up in a generation when the world was a lot safer, a world where many wouldn’t even bother to lock their doors, where police rarely had to handle major crimes like murder, especially not in the country where he was sheriff. Now that crime has evolved from small bank robberies and vandalism to murder and drug trafficking, Bell doesn’t know how to deal with these crimes effectively. Even when Tom was shipped overseas to fight in the military he admits that when all his men were dying on the battlefield and he was the only one to come back alive, it was only because “when it got dark”  he “cut and [ran]”(266) and that was how he won his bronze star. Bell may have gone to war but he didn’t fight like a man; he just ran away to live another day, which is not sign of being a brave and protective sheriff. The world he grew up in isn’t the world he lives in now and as Bell remembers his dream of his father riding “past him… carrying fire in a horn,” Bell knew that he “was goin' on ahead and that he was fixin’ to make fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold”, and at the end of his dream Bell knew that “whenever [he] got there [his father] would be there” (309) waiting for him. Bell’s dream is proof that he knew it was finally time for him to retire and prepare for death, for he realized that there was nothing out in the world for him anymore and that he simply didn’t belong anymore.

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