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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
Presently, with a great heaviness in the air, the tourists creep wearily through Arches National Park. One would have to be crazy to come to the desert in this heat—both the tourists and Abbey himself. Clouds form by noon, bringing some rain in a gravelly consistency like tomato soup or blood. After this, thunderstorms kick up tumbleweeds.
Tomato soup, gravel, and blood are classic examples of Abbey’s poetic language. They are unlikely comparisons to rain, but they nonetheless succeed in conveying the strangeness of a desert storm.
Themes
Evening brings nighthawks, who circle the air and dive to earth suddenly. The noise of their wings is a distant roar. Sleeping outside, Abbey is kept up by their screeches, and he watches the peculiar horizon lighting between dusk and dawn. Coyotes sing strange, unearthly songs, too. They sound like an electronic instrument, like a cithara or Onde Martinote.
Again, Abbey uses music, not words to capture the desert. It’s safe to assume readers have never heard a cithara (an ancient stringed lyre) or an Ondes Marenot (an early electronic keyboard) in real life. The outlandishness of these comparisons communicates the strangeness of the coyotes’ song in a way that verbal description never could.
Themes
In the morning, Abbey is called on a manhunt for a missing tourist across Dead Horse Mesa. He meets his brother Johnny (also spending the summer as a ranger), Merle McRae, Floyd Bence, and some policemen, to search for the man: a photographer who left his car on the road three days ago. Though the man’s nephew describes him with hope, everyone else is sure he’s dead by now, as an airplane search has proved useless.
Given Abbey’s ongoing critique of cars in national parks, it’s significant that the photographer has left his car on the paved highway. Any true entrance into the wilderness, Abbey suggests, must take place apart from automobiles or pavement. His coming thoughts on how death in nature recirculates human beings’ energy to the landscape will hinge on this abandonment of technology.
Themes
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For four hours, the party trudges, checking the usual places of shade: trees, cliffs, and gullies. Staring down one such cliff, with its alluring beauty and power, Abbey quotes a warning against gazing into the abyss, “lest the abyss gaze into you.” He spots far-off features, including a rock maze.
This quote from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche gives readers the sense that this cliff is such a powerful sight for Abbey that the rock itself has a sentient ability to look back. The resulting image—of Abbey and the canyon staring eye-to-eye—is an ironic illustration of Abbey’s desire to commune with the earth.
Themes
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Coming upon a sickened-looking Johnny, Abbey realizes that his brother has found the corpse. A mile from the road, under the cover of a juniper on a ridge, the dead photographer is bloated like a balloon. When the others arrive, the two brothers try to trace the man’s path to the tree, discovering by his tracks where he grew confused and doubled back.
The fact that the photographer died under a juniper—Abbey’s symbol of closeness to the desert—illustrates the man’s bond to nature in his final moments. Before Abbey ruminates on this, he allows readers to recall the juniper’s key role in his own quest for environmental unity, especially when he climbed inside one while reasoning with Moon-Eye the horse.
Themes
Abbey admires the steep drop-off and the land below, noting the seldom traversed labyrinth of canyons known as The Maze. Abbey wants to congratulate the dead photographer on his noble death—it was good luck to die out in the open, alone, instead of under the “leech and priest.” Though Abbey can’t speak for the man, it’s easy to imagine how his fear soon abated as his life waned, leaving him to dream of soaring out into space.
Abbey’s envy at a death in nature is key here. Notably, the man dies away from “leech and priest,” symbols of modern medicine and religion, respectively—two things that, in Abbey’s view, equally distract people from the spiritual depth of nature.
Themes
The party loads the corpse into the body bag and onto the stretcher, and begins the walk back. They all joke the whole way back about how heavy and leaky the corpse is, and how hungry and tired they are. If they’d known the photographer, maybe they could be reverent—but they didn’t, so they don’t care. It’s not that Abbey wants others dead; it’s just that the departure of a middle-aged man makes room for the young and will keep the circle of life going. It’s a ruthless cycle, but a clean and beautiful one.
Here, Abbey strikes at the heart of his calm acceptance of death, an acceptance that pervades this chapter as well as his previous recollections of the paranoid cattle rancher Roy Scobie. By making room for new generations, death is a clean and efficient system—a natural “economy,” as he previously described, that connects and equalizes all life on Earth.
Themes
Some days later—how many Abbey can’t say, as calendars have become meaningless—Abbey stands one evening watching Venus low on the horizon. He sees hawks in the sky and imagines the dead photographer from that perspective: he sees himself through the birds’ cruel eyes. While fantasizing from the bird’s perspective, Abbey feels himself sink into the desert’s infinitely large landscape. His perspective zooms out from himself, to the surrounding canyons, out to Utah and Colorado, the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, the Pacific Ocean, to the edges of the Earth and outer space—a realm that human beings can’t discover.
The telescoping view in this scene—from Abbey himself all the way out to the Earth’s atmosphere—is a perfect summary of Abbey’s thoughts on death in this chapter. One human being (for example, Abbey) is so small, in the grand scheme of Earth, that the only reasonable conclusion is that humanity is a part of nature. So the death of one tiny element of this picture (Abbey, or any other individual) hardly makes a difference to the whole.
Themes
