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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Desert Solitaire, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Wilderness, Society, and Liberty
Nature, Wonder, and Religion
Language and Reality
Humanity, the Environment, and Arrogance
Summary
Analysis
In the hot and “holy” light of June, Abbey spends a day helping a local rancher Roy Scobie round up his cows. Scobie is a gentle old man but has a strong fear of dying of a heart attack out on the range. Though Abbey is too young to know much about this fear, he feels that dying in nature is much better than dying in a sterilized hospital.
The “holy” sunlight is a clear indication of nature’s divinity, which Abbey extends to his thoughts on death. To die outside, for Abbey, would be a direct and beautiful confrontation of nature—a spiritual experience in a realm where human beings naturally belong. Scobie’s fear of dying, by contrast, fails to recognize this truth, further highlighting Abbey’s view that human obsessions (like mortality) stem from a misplaced sense of superiority.
Themes
Along with the Basque cowherd, Viviano Jacquez, Scobie and Abbey set out in the morning on horseback and start wrangling cattle. Since the ground is too hard for fences, the men start wrangling all cattle in sight; they intend to divvy them up later by their brands, ranchers’ unique signatures. The lack of fences means that ranchers must cooperate and use the honor system.
The cow branding symbolizes desert ranchers’ cooperative instincts. Because the earth is so unforgiving here—too hard to accept fence posts—ranchers must use a mutual honor system to make their living. This is a perfect example of the generosity and effectiveness that comes from living off the earth, supporting Abbey’s argument that a life in nature ultimately improves democratic societies.
Themes
As the men ride along and swat at flies, Abbey considers Jacquez, an immigrant from Spain whose limited English consists mainly of swear words. Though a capable cowboy who enjoys his work, he is lazy, has no sense of time, and complains to everyone who will listen. Worst of all is the prejudice he suffers from local Moabites: though Jacquez is European, he’s the victim of racism when he goes to town. This causes him to resent not only the minority groups with which the locals confuse him (Mexican, Native American, and African American) but also to resent his own heritage.
Though Abbey thinks highly of the locals, their racism toward Jacquez contrasts sharply with Abbey’s humbling experiences in the desert, which have led him to the conclusion that everyone (and everything) is equal. Jacquez’s self-resentment is a sad side effect of this broader human arrogance, and the secondary hatred of African Americans would have been an especially poignant illustration at the time Abbey was writing—in the wake of the Civil Rights Act and mere months before Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination, both of which prompted global awareness of black rights.
Themes
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As the sun grows hotter into the afternoon, Abbey grows weak, hungry, and thirsty. The other men, however, seem unfazed as they ride on. Stopping at a nearby patch of shade, Scobie opens up about his fear of death, a neighbor near his age having suddenly died of cardiac arrest while picking peaches. Scobie drifts into thought. He seems troubled beyond the simple fear of death: once, while staying at his ranch, Abbey caught him sleepwalking with a revolver in his hand, claiming to be protecting his chickens (an animal he didn’t even own). Furthermore, Scobie is stingy, using half-broken equipment and grossly underpaying and underfeeding his employees in the attempt to save money. Abbey could help relieve his fear by quoting philosophers, like Sophocles, who claim that earthly life is a mere shadow, but he decides that this would be worthless and lets Scobie live his own life.
Scobie’s obsession with money is just as bad as his fear of mortality. This obsession is a casualty of capitalist development, as readers will soon see, and is yet another sad effect of human arrogance. Abbey’s attitude toward Scobie—first frustration, then resignation—says a lot for Abbey’s attitude toward language. Trained in philosophy, Abbey has an arsenal of writers (mainly Ancient Greeks) who once hoped to dispel the fear of death as irrational. But that Abbey gives up on these writers before even trying to comfort Scobie speaks to the ultimate uselessness of this philosophy: words, it turns out, are no match for human pain. This sad recognition contributes to Abbey’s broader argument about the uselessness of his own prose in trying to capture the desert.
Themes
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Breaking their silent contemplation, Scobie urges the group forward. They saddle back up and ride on through more hot canyons, in search of cattle. As Abbey kicks a stubborn cow into action, he contemplates the “slow, ponderous dirge” of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. Eventually, the men come across a patch of quicksand. They shuttle one cow across safely, but the next one gets stuck. The men dismount, rope the cow’s neck, and attempt to pull her out with their horses. Finally, the cow breaks free and is visibly terrified, her eyes protruding and tongue discolored. Scobie remarks on the cow’s monetary value while Jacquez curses at the animal.
Here, Abbey introduces music to his desert ruminations. Beethoven’s “slow, ponderous dirge” is the perfect match for the interminable desert heat. This scene arrives right after Abbey’s dismissal of philosophers; by showing how evocative music can be, in contrast to the useless words of Sophocles, Abbey makes a strong case against language. Abbey will return to music throughout the book in his quest to describe the desert with accuracy.
Themes
After this close call, the men catch their breath and ride on with their herd. Exhausted and thirsty, Abbey lags behind Scobie and Jacquez. He stops to admire a clear stream and to refresh himself, and after the last, hot stretch, the men shuttle their cows across the highway to Scobie’s truck. As the men dismount their horses, Abbey watches the horses gallop around in relief and roll on the floor. He knows how they feel. After loading up the cows, the men reward themselves with beer at the local bar, but Scobie soon grows pensive again. This frustrates Abbey, who wants Scobie to stop thinking and to accept the “wild beautiful utterly useless truth.” Jacquez slips on his way to the bathroom and seems embarrassed, though the others don’t acknowledge this.
Abbey’s sympathy with Scobie’s horses, his conviction that he can read and share their feelings, is an example of his bond with the animal kingdom. From this scene on, horses will become an important way for Abbey to illustrate this bond. The emotion he recognizes here is joy—a distinctly human trait that Abbey likes to identify in other species as evidence for his unlikely kinship. In contrast to the horses’ joy, Scobie’s blindness to the “wild beautiful utterly useless truth” of the natural order seems especially foolish. This memorable compound phrase captures Abbey’s overwhelming sense of wonder, a feeling which the money-driven Scobie can’t reach.
Themes
Like the conclusion of the Alfred T. Husk’s saga, in which Husk’s unloving widow reaps the rewards of his work, Scobie’s demise is an ironic reminder that death can occur at any moment. To worry about it, Abbey argues, is a useless and even capitalistic fixation on the material realm. To confront the realities of the universe—as Abbey has been doing—is a much more rewarding use of time.
Themes
