A River Runs Through It: Part 1 Summary & Analysis

The narrator, Norman Maclean, relates that in his Presbyterian family in western Montana, fly-fishing and religion were considered of one piece. Norman’s father would tell him and his brother, Paul, all about the fishermen who were Christ’s disciples.

On Sundays, the young Norman and Paul have to spend the entire day in Sunday school, at services, and studying the catechism. Their father says that the most important part of the catechism is the first question, the question of what the chief end of man is: the answer is to glorify God. Their father often energizes himself by reciting his next sermon to them.

Their father was never an incredibly talented fisherman, but he is graceful. As a Scot and Presbyterian, Norman notes, his father believes that man has fallen from an original state of grace into sin. Only by getting in tune with God’s rhythms, including the four-count rhythm of fly-fishing, can one regain beauty. Their father uses the word “beautiful” often.

Norman’s father’s rod—he disdains anyone who calls it a pole—is made of split bamboo wrapped in delicate thread. For him, the art of fishing is sacred, rather than fun: it reflects man’s fallen nature in his inability to control the delicate rod. For Norman, it’s counterintuitive that artistry is needed to simply pick up a rod with line on it and throw it across the river.

As easy as the task seems, “unredeemed man” will always lean too far back with the rod, often getting it stuck behind a bush. Man’s natural instinct is also to flick the rod back and forth so that the fly falls out of the air into the water, instead of attempting to create a circular movement between line and fly and transparent leader (the line directly connected to the fly). As soon as the forward movement of these three elements begins, it has to be reversed so that the fish only sees the life-like fly.

In fly-fishing, the four-count rhythm means that first, the line, leader, and fly lift off the water. They are then thrown into the air, and there needs to be one beat to allow the fly and leader to get behind the line. At the fourth beat, one must powerfully throw the line into the rod and coast to a landing.

Norman’s father is always particular about these things, among others—he believes that eternal salvation is tied to grace and to art, though none of these things are easy. He teaches his two sons how to cast by using their mother’s piano metronome. Paul, who is three years younger than Norman, is already ahead of his brother in fishing-related matters. He reads the old book The Compleat Angler and tells Norman that the author didn’t even know how to spell “complete.” Paul says that he would have liked to place fishing bets with this author.

Despite their difference in age, Norman knows even as a young man that Paul will be an expert fly-fisherman. Paul always loves to bet on himself, an interest that Norman never shared. Paul never seems like Norman’s “kid brother,” but rather an artistic master. Paul never wants help or advice, and ultimately, Norman (speaking from the present) says, he couldn’t help Paul at all.

The brothers already have different personalities before Norman starts working for the U.S. Forest Service at the age of fifteen, and begins to spend summers away from fishing. Paul had decided that fishing was the main thing worth doing in life, so his summer job is a lifeguard at the pool. He chooses this job so he can find girls for dates during the day and then fish in the early evenings. Paul’s chosen profession would be a reporter on a Montana paper.

The Maclean family is very close-knit. Norman and Paul are taught that outside the sacred walls of church and family, the world is full of “bastards”—more of them the further one gets from Missoula, Montana.

Norman and Paul also have in common a certain toughness—Norman’s from working at the Forest Service, and Paul from pure internal stubbornness. At one point, as a boy, Paul wins a battle of wills with his father about eating oatmeal in the morning.

Norman and Paul share a street fighting theory: if it seems like a fight is brewing, it’s important to be the first one to throw a punch, so that you’re one punch ahead from the start. The problem, Norman notes, is that sometimes you’ll preemptively hit someone who then makes it his stated goal to kill you.

The only time Norman and Paul ever fight, they don’t see their mother, a petite woman, come between them to try to stop them—until she is suddenly on the floor. Each of the brothers shouts that it was the other one who knocked her down. Meanwhile she staggers around without her glasses on, claiming that she just slipped and fell.