It is inevitable that Jim Jarmusch had had William Blake in his mind.
The case may be true about its screenplay writer who has given so much allusion to Blake in the film.
The western setting of the film reminds one of the visionary characters of Blake the poet's works such as Jerusalem, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and other prophetic books of the Romantic poet of the nineteenth century.
The long shoots of the film also adds to this visionary character of the film and brings to the surface Blake the poets and not the Blake the accountant's mind.
In a sense it is a tribute to Blake that one may claim to have been quite obscure during his age and well so in the centuries to come.
One may discover that in every see of the film, he or she can discover an aspect of the work that would remain undiscovered in the previous sees.
The elements are well structured so that the final feeling that comes to the audience is of the kind of catharsis that Aristotle gave in his Poetics defining tragedy as the best genre in preference to the comedy and romance.
Regarding the old Western setting of the film, it is quite an American version of the narration of the events with much cry and hue and it brings to mind the civil war and the period before that when much of the Wild West was still savage in the sense that Whites understood.
But the references to Indian Nobody in the films adds to the grandeur and at the same time a supernatural quality to the visionary life style of the Indians as more close to the nature than White manipulators of the nature and countryside as well.
One can find parallel narrative tools in the film.
We can identify four elements which add to the quality of the narrative as structure and makes a frame of reference to which audience feels a kind of empathy.
The most identification is made in the films intentionally or unintentionally is with Blake the accountant, though it may be said that the real identification is with the Indian Nobody as embodiment of Nature (for he has been dispatched to Europe as a model savage).
The character names have been chosen in a way that adds to director's emphasis on the visionary nature of the plot and at the same time its allusions to Blake the poet can be called a tribute to Blake the poet and the placid Indian as complementary to each other.
The prostitute Thell's name comes from The Book of Thell by Blake.
It is a visionary poem by the poet in which Thel is female God or goddess which at the end prophecies the revolution and the devastation of Europe, though there is a scene that Thell is killed by the Thel's ex-boyfriend Charlie, it is an embodiment of devastation and exploitation of the female or the rose as a metaphor for pure love in a poem by Blake the poet beginning with 'O Rose Thou Art sick".
At the same time it may be in parallel with the sense of exploiting the savageness of the West by the white manipulators of the America.
The plot is narrated in a way that is conducive to the feeling that it is Indians that at the final stage owns the land and preserve it as it is because it brings to the surface Roseau's Noble Savage or the primitive man whose tabula rasa is still immaculate and is the embodiment of the perfect man against for example, William Golding's The Lord of the Flies which have another view that human nature is in itself is dark and human being is egoistic in their drives to survival.
The third element is the fusion of literary narration with cinematic narration.
The plot is narrated by scenes and at the same time we have a literary narration which is a newer narration of Blake the poet's works and Blake the accountant's life story as a victim of destructive forces of the nature or human nature as given by Golding as dark and brute.
It plays a verbal game with the name Blake which adds to the importance of allusion in elucidating hidden angles in the protagonist's life.
In a scene Nobody recites some lines by Blake the poet and says to Blake the accountant that he is the visionary character that Blake the poet has created in his works, of which Blake the accountant is not aware.
But in real cinematic narration it is the Blake the accountant that is the actual visionary character who haunts over many works of Romantic poets, the majority of visionary journey takers who are lonely and sometimes almost outcasts which reminds audience in the film of the wanted posters of the white against Nobody and Blake the accountant.
The Blake Hunt scene also is the embodiment of destructive forces of the dark nature of the man who is brutal and beastlike.
The film is criticism of American neo colonialist attitudes and savage hunt that have common place in the America of the nineteenth century.
But the film is silent in one topic and it is 'which forces becomes dominant in the nature, Blake and Nobody on one side and the Man-hunters on the other', a question to which audience may find a better answer.