Desert Solitaire - Questions/Analysis

 

 

 

 

16 March 2005

 

EDWARD ABBEY

DESERT SOLITAIRE – A Season in the Wilderness

 

 

Discussion Points

 

 

1. What is the tone of the narrative? (See “tone” in LB 32, 116, and 127)

 

           The tone combines rational appeals to reader’s capacities for logical reasoning with emotional appeals to readers’ beliefs and feelings. Ultimately, these tones contribute to ethical appeal, and so does acknowledging opposing views. In addition, a sincere and even tone assures readers balanced and want to reason with them.

 

 

 

2. How would you describe Abbey’s ethos? Give an example

 

 

“I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it’s possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us.” Showing his ethos, Abbey run away from the man-made material system, but at the same time he wants to learn basic principles in nature.

 

 

 

3. Introduction and “First Morning” (Chapter 1): Here, Abbey sets up the essay, giving his purpose and on page 7 a thesis. What are they?

 

 

           In Author’s Introduction, “This is not a travel guide but an elegy.” An elegy means a song of sorrow; a dirge; a threnody. Abbey wants to share his eye-opening astonishment of nature, as well as a memorial for people whose part of nature. Abbey also set his purpose for his book in “First Morning” stated, “Like a god, like an ogre? The personification of the natural is exactly the tendency I wish to suppress in myself, to eliminate for good.”

 

 

 

4. Chapter 2 “Solitaire”: The juniper is a recurring image. What significance does Abbey seem to give it? (14)

 

 

The juniper is a recurring image that it reminds him the sweetest memory once Abbey had before.

 

 

 

5. Chapter 3 “Serpents of Paradise”: How does this chapter serve his purpose? How does he turn the Garden of Eden myth upside down?

 

 

           Abbey is showing his optimistic posture for nature. Even gopher snake can be a good friend if you have positive attitude toward living nature.

 

 

 

6. Chapter 4 “Cliffrose and Bayonets”: What is the significance of the following: Abbey’s “favorite juniper” (32), the killing of the rabbit (40-42), and the “several ways of looking at Delicate Arch” (44-45)?

 

 

          Abbey sees his “favorite juniper” adapting the environment as it is, one side is growing with harmony and full of vigor, but the others partly dead in nature. However, the killing of the rabbit, he shows a stranger from another world who doesn’t know how to deal with it, yet finally realizes what is not to do through his experiment. on the way back to his trailer, he sees Delicate Arch in several ways, the scene through the hole as a picture, or Arch is a frame itself which more delicate than the picture, and as a whole scenery with wilderness nature.

 

 

 

7. So far, how would you describe Abbey’s attitude toward nature? Give an example for support.

 

 

          “Standing there, gaping at this monstrous and inhuman spectacle of rock and cloud sky and space, I feel a ridiculous greed and possessiveness come over me. I want to know it all, possess it all, embrace the entire scene intimately, deeply, totally, as a man desires a beautiful woman.” Abbey is overwhelming over amazing nature which he has never felt in systemic world filled with clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus.

 

 

 

8. Having read thus far, how do the following authors lend insight into Abbey, if any: Plato, Bacon, Wordsworth, Gould, and Carson? Give an example.

 

 

           Plato: Abbey finally opens his eyes escaping from dark cave and reaching toward beauty of nature, the Good. on page 6, “Standing there, gaping at this monstrous and inhuman spectacle of rock and cloud sky and space, I feel a ridiculous greed and possessiveness come over me. I want to know it all, possess it all, embrace the entire scene intimately, deeply, totally, as a man desires a beautiful woman.”

 

           Wordsworth: He sees his favorite juniper as a recollection of the sweetest memory that gives him “Intimations of Immorality.” on page 14, “The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante’s paradise could equal it.”

 

           Gould: He describes nature what he sees as it is like what Gould suggests to us. on page 24, “How can I descend to such anthropomorphism? Easily – but is it, in this case, entirely false? Perhaps not. I am not attributing human motives to my snake and bird acquaintances…. Which is exactly the way it should be.”

 

           Carson: He provoked from poisoned chemical man has devised under selfish mind without considering nature. From Carson’s essay, “The greatest damage done to the environment by well-intentioned people who were unaware of the devastation they caused.”