Question

How does Bell interpret the changing world in No Country For Old Men?

Answer 1

The novel begins with a monologue fromSheriff Ed Tom Bell. Each of the following chapters begins with a similar monologue told from the present tense, after the story’s events. Bell speaks about a nineteen-year-old man who is on his way to the gas chamber because of Bell’s testimony. The young man murdered his fourteen-year-old girlfriend. Bell meets with the young man before his execution. The papers have suggested that the murder was a crime of passion, but the young man tells him there wasn’t any passion to it. The young man tells Bell he knows he is going to hell. Bell wonders if this young man is “a new kind”, and wonders what society can say to a man who believes he has no soul.That Sherriff Bell frames the story of No Country for Old Men with monologues told after the events of the story suggests that these events have profoundly changed him. Bell’s anecdote about the young man has no connection, in terms of plot, with the rest of the story. His decision to include it suggests that the anecdote has an explanatory or spiritual connection to the events of the story; this connection seems to be Bell’s conviction that some new evil or amorality is rising—what he calls “a new kind”—as well as his profound doubt about what society can do about it.Active Themes  Bell believes there is a way to view the world that is different than his, and suggests that there is a true and living prophet of destruction walking through the world. Bell has crossed paths with the prophet, but doesn’t want to do it again. He reflects on his job as Sheriff, stating that you have to be willing to put your soul at risk to confront a man like the prophet, and he is unwilling to gamble with his soul.