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True Grit by Charles Portis

Introduction

True Grit, Charles Portis' most famous western novel and tells the story of Mattie Ross, who was fourteen years old when a coward named Tom Chaney shot her father from behind in Fort Smith, Arkansas. He not only robbed of his life, but also his horse and one hundred and fifty U.S. dollars. Mattie leaves her parental home, in order to avenge her father. She rents the hardest and most reckless marshal so that they can find, the one-eyed Rooster Cogburn to identify Chaney, who is hiding in an Indian reservation (Fischer, Collins, Latham, pp. 247-249). The entire book is told through the eyes of the teenager Mattie, but the winks are clearly those of an adult. This puts present violence in the book, however, it is casually passed as something what is daily fare, which is part of life in the “Wild West”. However, Charles Portis never lose sight that western depiction should focus mainly on action, and the obligatory shoot-out, therefore, the readers fully meets their expectations.

Discussion

Grit is a classic western in approach, but also many other things. Portis takes his readers to Arkansas, in 1870, where the rancher Frank Ross travels to Fort Smith to buy a consignment of horses and there is assassinated by one of his employees, Tom Chaney. Chaney fled to Indian Territory and joins a band of outlaws. Days later, Mattie Ross's daughter, a girl of fourteen, comes to town to take over the corpse of his father. But Mattie is not a teenager anymore but a stubborn girl, determined and self-sufficient in the world. She was determined to avenge his father, hires Rooster Cogburn, a longtime curator, crooked, coarse, drunk and ruthless, to pursue and capture Chaney. They are joined by La ...