He feels no real sense of duty towards them, but for the responsibility his job places on him: he’s “supposed” look after them. Bell, the man at the top of the pecking order at the Terrell County PD lacks a sense of civic duty. Regardless of the body counts, bereaved widows, and property damage Bell clocks out at the same time every day, goes home to his ranch and Lorretta, and lets it all go. Every two weeks, he gets a paycheck for his efforts. Although supposedly a “good guy,” Bell arguably represents the novel’s most pointed critique of rugged individualism. The moral islands represented by the Cowboy (whose fantasy of self-reliance gets him and his wife killed) and the Killer (who is an unmoored nihilist) are not representatives of rugged individualism’s acceptable social face. But Bell has reached (or inherited) a position of power and privilege in which he can hold himself morally immune and suffer no real repercussions. He is physically and materially unaffected by the devastation, and given that his own social position and income is assured regardless of events, has no incentive to change his beliefs or approach. But Bell is also a tragic figure who suffers a crisis of conscience near the novel’s end. A true believer in the individual moral failings of drug users and dealers, he comes to recognize that he cannot make sense of the drug epidemic’s scale in those terms. He witnesses dope dealers selling narcotics to school children (194), peace officers along the Texas border enriching themselves through narcotics (216), even white collar, middle-class citizens falling prey to crack cocaine (304). Faced with overwhelming numbers that cannot be explained away as mere individual choices his worldview wavers: “There’s always been narcotics. But people don’t just up and decide to dope themselves for no reason. By the millions’’ (303). But that is also the extent of his insight. To him, the issue cannot be explained in terms of socioeconomic or cultural issues that brought the crack cocaine epidemic to his town in the first place. Rather than consider the phenomenon in its cultural or collective aspect, he internalizes it as his own individual failure. Bell retires at the end of the novel, with Terrell County in near-ruins and having failed to apprehend Chigurh. When his wife says that these things were not his fault, he answers that they were, because “if you got a bad enough dog in your yard people will stay out of it. And they didn’t” (299). Ever the rugged individualist, Bell seems to believe that he should have been able to stop the Chigurh and the drug epidemic by sheer force of personal will. Of course, Bell was never going to be enough to address the crushing socioeconomic conditions and pervasive alienation that allowed for the epidemic’s spread. But his rugged individualist ethos also meant he did not conceive of a unified department or community as a path forward. All he could do, and all he empowered his deputies to do, was throw up their hands in exasperation. In the end, the Sheriff walks away from his failing jurisdiction materially and physically unharmed. But he also knows that the consequences of his passive negligence are borne by others. Just as Carla Jean suffers because of 105
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