Reading The Gunfighter as Homeric Epic

This paper examines the progress of the warrior's glory and his homecoming through a comparison of Henry King's The Gunfighter (1950) and Homer's eighth century BCE Iliad and Odyssey. It explores the themes of the hero's cunning, the destination, homecoming, and reunion in the Odyssey and his being condemned to glory, his self-recognition, and the roles of irony and fate in the Iliad. This is a tale about the gunfighter as warrior, the hero who desires honor, receives it through gifts, and ends in achieving glory through those gifts. It is a tale of discovery through self-recognition that ends in the repudiation of that glory so dearly won. It is a tale of the hero's realization as he turns homeward from the wars and inward, away from the externals that glory represents, to discover that his humanity lies in the importance to him of family.