Excellent analysis! Along with The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, I consider The Searchers to be John Wayne's finest Western and probably his greatest movie. The characters of Ethan Edwards and Tom Doniphon are similar in that they both are necessary to tame the West and deal with the savagery of the frontier, but neither one is fit to govern the society that replaces it. This is shown in TMWSLV in the development of Doniphon and Rance Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart), as it becomes clear that it's Rance more than Doniphon who is needed to establish a civilized nation. It's Doniphon, though, whose brutality is needed to defeat Valance as the necessary pretext to that civilization. So too in The Searchers. It's Edwards who is driven to find Debbie, no matter what the cost to the family or to himself. Edwards is the blunt instrument who can confront and defeat the savagery he encounters. But Edwards also knows that he can't be part of the civilization to which he returned Debbie. He's a creature of the frontier, so he declines to step over the threshold, instead returning to the realm from which he came at the film's beginning.
Excellent analysis! Along with The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, I consider The Searchers to be John Wayne's finest Western and probably his greatest movie. The characters of Ethan Edwards and Tom Doniphon are similar in that they both are necessary to tame the West and deal with the savagery of the frontier, but neither one is fit to govern the society that replaces it. This is shown in TMWSLV in the development of Doniphon and Rance Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart), as it becomes clear that it's Rance more than Doniphon who is needed to establish a civilized nation. It's Doniphon, though, whose brutality is needed to defeat Valance as the necessary pretext to that civilization. So too in The Searchers. It's Edwards who is driven to find Debbie, no matter what the cost to the family or to himself. Edwards is the blunt instrument who can confront and defeat the savagery he encounters. But Edwards also knows that he can't be part of the civilization to which he returned Debbie. He's a creature of the frontier, so he declines to step over the threshold, instead returning to the realm from which he came at the film's beginning.