Unforgiven Literary Elements

Western

Big Whiskey, Wyoming in 1881 at some point after the shooting of Pres. James Garfield.

The film features no voice-over narration. The perspective is primarily seen through the eyes of William Munny though there are many scenes in which he is not present.

The mood of the film is almost at all times dark and melancholic but this is conveyed through multiple tonal shifts which create an overall feeling of ironic self-awareness of the story’s subversion of the genre’s mythic conventions.

Protagonist: William Munny. Antagonist: Little Bill.

Munny and his fellow bounty hunters versus Big Whiskey Sheriff Little Bill and his minions.

The story comes to its climax when Munny finally shoots and kills Little Bill and proceeds to warn the rest of the town that he will be come back seeking vengeance if any more harm comes to the prostitutes working there.

At several points in the film, the importance of a steady hand, good eyesight and mental focus are exhibited or discussing relative to consequences of shooting a pistol in order to avoid missing the target. All of this foreshadows the climax in which Munny only manages to survive due to being missed to the panicky shooting of Little Bill’s minions.

That Munny’s dead wife is the moral engine fueling his participation in the bounty hunting is an exquisitely understated commentary on the mostly unwritten role in the history of the taming of the American frontier.

There are several strong undercurrents of allusion to the classic western “Shane” in the film’s storyline. That film is about a gunslinger looking to put his past behind him who finds himself inexorably called back to action to defend the defenseless against corrupt interests.

The persistent rain is imagery which symbolizes the moral cleansing coming to Big Whiskey. The unusually loud sound effects of the thunder is imagery which symbolizes the violence which is required to bring about that cleansing.

Little Bill is sheriff of Big Whiskey and is given full authority for what might be described as keeping its house in order while paradoxically proving in several ways throughout the film that he literally cannot even keep his own house—in a constant state of construction—in order.

The film is built upon a series of paralleled juxtapositions: the names English Bob versus Little Bill, the arrival and departure of the two gunslingers—English Bob and Will Munny—into town, the different versions of stories told to the writer by Bob and Bill, etc.

N/A

Little Bill’s unfinished house is the personification of the failure to domesticate the American west through autocracy. Little Bill is singularly in power over everything in Big Whiskey and represents real-life authoritarian figures from the Johnson County ranchers to Wyatt Earp who eventually learned this lesson themselves.