True Grit 2

2.  “People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day.” 11

The opening line in Charles Portis’s True Grit sets up the overall feeling of the book. It is blunt, smart, and rather proper. This is Mattie Ross, the main character and narrator who goes out to attain her version of justice, which is the blood of her father’s killer. It first seems strange that a proper christian girl in the late 1800’s would want to go into the wilderness and kill a man, but the setting and time period must be taken into account. A fourteen-year-old girl today would most likely never consider this, but Mattie lives in the poor south, post Civil war. Death was a common punishment and the meaning of justice was literally “an eye for an eye.”