DESERT SOLITAIRE

Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey



Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey

Introduction

When Desert Solitaire first appeared in 1968, Edward Abbey was a renowned novelist. His second novel, The Brave Cowboy: An Old Tale in a New Time (1956) had been translated by Dalton Trumbo into a successful film, Lonely Are the Brave, in 1962, starring Kirk Douglas as Abbey's anachronistic hero, Jack Burns. Burns, who loves the land and the freedom of his life as an itinerant sheepherder, finds that he is a man out of step with his time (Bishop, 2005). The encroachment of the city upon the surrounding countryside, aided by technological progress, becomes a metaphor for the destruction of a way of life characterized by personal freedom, physical labor, and respect for the land. Abbey picks up these themes again in Fire on the Mountain (1962), in which John Vogelin battles the United States government to preserve his ranch, which has been earmarked for use as a missile test site.

Discussion

Desert Solitaire is at once a paean to the wondrous beauty of the land, an elegy for its death at the hands of what Abbey labels “Industrial Tourism,” and an angry indictment of those who would exploit it for pleasure or profit. Desert Solitaire is an autobiographical work that contains Abbey's views on a variety of subjects from the problems of the United States Park Service to personal metaphysics.

Ostensibly, Desert Solitaire stems from Abbey's three seasons with the Park Service at Arches National Monument, in the desert canyon lands of southern Utah. In the introduction to the work, Abbey explains that he is combining the experiences of these three summers into one for narrative consistency. The book is arranged in a series of personal essays that range from an evocative description of the land and its flora and fauna in “The First Morning” to the gruesome description of a decaying corpse in “The Dead Man at Grandview Point.” Each chapter is a separate essay, linked to others by a pervasive sense of passion and humor. The voice of loss and anger is balanced by a saving irony that the author frequently turns on himself and his narrative. Abbey gently mocks himself with chapters titled “The Serpents of Paradise” and “Cowboys and Indians.” Yet he never wants his readers to forget that his efforts have seriousness of purpose that transcends style that attention must be paid to the impact of commercial and industrial growth on the physical and spiritual landscape of the American Southwest (Bergon, 2004).

Despite Abbey's protestations, Desert Solitaire's serious defenders as well as detractors are legion. It has become one of the focal points in the debate over the use and abuse of land west of the one hundredth meridian. Regardless of the frequently militant stance of its author, Desert Solitaire clearly reflects concerns of certain essayists who have gone before him. Moreover, Abbey is not unaware of his predecessors and acknowledges his debt in a bibliographic paragraph toward the end of the ...