’Some Are Born to Endless Night’: Echo and Epitaph in Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man
’Some Are Born to Endless Night’: Echo and Epitaph in Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man

Summary/Abstract: This essay examines Jim Jarmusch’s film Dead Man, a Western that takes the poetry of William Blake both as content and as form. I argue that the film uses two poetic strategies that it associates with Blake – echo and epitaph – to interrogate and destabilize contemporary understandings of identity. I conclude that the film dramatizes how the poetic voice, and by extension, the poetic identity, is always spoken through by some other voice, a conclusion that is mirrored in the formal structure of the film itself. These conclusions also underscore how newer forms of media continue to rework and revise concepts of identity in an increasingly fragmented, hybridized, and performative culture.

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