True Grit

True Grit is a story of two versions of Mattie Ross. The young, precocious 14-year-old is the protagonist of the story, but the wiser, more mature 64-year-old is the narrator. As such, the novel is the story of the significant moment in Mattie’s life that springboarded the younger version of Mattie into the older version. The contrast between the two versions is made evident in the style of narration and the structure. The novel is a reminiscence told in the past tense by an older, experienced person looking back over her life. That the older Mattie cannot help but pepper her prose with advice, reflections, and Bible references shows the way in which she hopes that her own experiences can guide others. Mattie may never have married, but her narration shows her desire to guide, teach, and correct others.

Mattie’s early narration blends descriptions of past events with her reflections—sometimes judgments—of choices that were made in the past. In narrating her story, Mattie does not shy away from recalling the pain or grief of her experiences, beginning immediately with a description of her father’s death. If the younger Mattie does not have time to grieve her father—having charged herself with the responsibility of caring for her father—then the older Mattie looks back at the mistakes that he might have made. Now that she has more experience of life and is older than her father ever was, Mattie feels comfortable criticizing—in the softest terms—the mistakes her father made. She might not have made the same deal for the ponies, for example, and she would certainly not have trusted Tom Chaney. But the young version of Mattie shown in the novel has yet to learn these lessons. She is constantly on guard about being taken advantage of, whether she is in the boarding house or the funeral home. She feels charged with responsibility, and she is unwilling to suffer fools, but she lacks the authority and the assertiveness of her older self. Past or present, one thing has not changed about Mattie: She loathes Tom Chaney. He has been and always will be the lowest of sinners in her eyes. The younger Mattie views him as the man who killed her father, but the older, more experienced Mattie has a better understanding of sin. The nuance of her experience does nothing for her opinion of Chaney, however. To her, he will always be “trash” (115).

In Chapter 2, Mattie the narrator falls into the background, and Mattie the protagonist comes to the fore. In many ways, she is the product of the post-Civil War era. Her father fought and nearly died in the war; many of the people she meets will have similar experiences. Given her young age, however, Mattie has no experience of the war as a formative or traumatic event. She was born into a country where slavery was already abolished, a sentiment which she takes as granted when she defends Yarnell against the racial slurs hurled at him on the train. Her language may sound awkward to the modern ear, but she acknowledges the humanity of African Americans in a way that other characters—those who lived through the Civil War and particularly those who fought for the South—do not. Mattie may not have been shaped by the war, but she is not a stranger to the violence of the world around her. She exists in a changing world, one in which the Wild West is beginning to fade from view. Her father has fallen victim to violence, and she wishes to enact violence on Tom Chaney in revenge. Mattie acknowledges the violence of her desires and foreshadows this self-awareness by subjecting herself to the sight of the hanging. Against Yarnell’s advice, she forces herself to watch the gruesome scene. Mattie does not revel in the violence of capital punishment, but she shows her maturity in bearing witness to the consequences of her desires, no matter how violent they may be. 

The novel’s major themes are hinted at in the first two chapters. By referencing her father’s experience in the Civil War, Mattie foreshadows that she will encounter people who, to some degree, are still Fighting the Last War. By deciding to enlist the services of the toughest marshal—Rooster Cogburn—Mattie begins The Search for True Grit, the ruthless quality that will allow her father’s death to be avenged. Finally, in revealing that Chaney escaped to the Indian Nation and likely joined Ned’s gang, future Violence Beyond the Border is foreshadowed.