True Grit Themes

Hamlet. Carrie. The Wrath of Khan. Mean Girls. The Avengers. Some of the greatest works of literature slash film are revenge narratives—just like True Grit. For Mattie Ross, revenge is a matter o...

Mattie Ross's arm, Rooster Cogburn's missing eye, Lucky Ned Pepper's lip (shot by Rooster), and LaBoeuf's busted skull—True Grit has more injuries than the trauma ward at your local hospital. Add...

Murder sets True Grit in motion and murder closes it out. (Well, killing, at least—whether or not it's murder is up for debate.) Mattie Ross wants Tom Chaney dead, but the question is: will he di...

You can't get much more American than the Wild West. For generations of people, the west has symbolized America: the frontier, the wide open prairie, the lack of government oversight or rule of law...

True Grit may have a female narrator, but Mattie doesn't seem to find women very interesting, have any female role models, or be very interested in following a typical female path. (The novel gets...

There is a fine line between cops and robbers in True Grit. U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn isn't all that different from the men he hunts down and often kills. Oh, sure, he's robbed a bank and some g...

For Mattie, justice is simple: you do the crime, you do the time. (Or you hang.) She judges criminals harshly, and only looks past Rooster's criminal tendencies because he'll make sure her justice...

True Grit takes place at a time when there weren't laws prohibiting the use of drugs or alcohol in the U.S. Not so in 1923 when Mattie is actually writing her story, and we bet she's all about Proh...

Okay, true. Nobody's exactly going to church in True Grit, and they're not exactly spending a lot of time debating the theological implications of their actions. But, religion is an essential eleme...