The Searchers and Taxi Driver: A Tale of One Anti-Hero Timothy Sexton College

When it was originally released into theaters during the cinema of paranoia that defined 1970’s American film, few aside from its makers, their roving band of American New Wave gang, and a few hip movie critics ever event thought to seek a connection between the gritty urban jungle presented in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and the iconic John Ford panorama of the west in his 1956 western The Searchers. If there was to be any sort of allusion to be made relative to origin and inspiration, it would seem to have been narrowed down to Dostoyevsky’s short novel Notes From Underground. Dostoyevsky’s original underground man and all those which followed in his place trace a direct line to Travis Bickle that was far easier to follow than the line connecting Ford’s anti-hero Ethan Edwards. And therein lies the crux of the matter.

The underground man in all his form is truly an anti-hero to the point that one can make a strong argument favoring handing the title of creator of the modern-day anti-hero to the great Russian writer. Branimir Rieger in “The Rebel in Literature” observes that underground men are rebellious figures “used by their writers to show how the dominant values of a culture were irreconcilable with the characters'...