« Mort ne sois pas fière »
Taxi Driver« Mort ne sois pas fière » appears in Travis Bickle’s notebook as part of a longer line, « Mort ne sois pas fière de tendre l’autre joue ». The phrase is significant as a fragment of language he recalls having encountered elsewhere: he presents the wording as something poetic he had read, while remaining unsure where he found it.
Notebook Form and Context
After the evening with Betsy, Bickle says he lost his sense of time. During that stretch, amid apricot liqueur and reds, he began writing various things in his notebook. The expanded phrase sits among these entries, alongside a fanciful instruction to pay a Betsy Palantine to him. Its setting makes it one example of the private, disjointed writing that follows his account of the evening.
Wording and Significance
The notebook version joins an address to death with the familiar gesture of turning the other cheek. Bickle calls it a poetic thing he supposes he read somewhere, so the text leaves both its precise source and the degree of his own alteration uncertain. The added wording brings the phrase into contact with an image of nonretaliation, without resolving what Bickle intends by placing the two together.
