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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
Though everyone has his or her own ideal place of beauty on Earth, Abbey’s is the desert of Utah. He decides this the day he arrives, after a long drive from Albuquerque to begin his summer job as a park ranger at Arches National Monument. He reaches the park headquarters in Moab after dark. After asking for directions, Abbey drives 20 miles of unpaved road past various wild animals, strange rock formations, and a warning sign for quicksand. Finally, he arrives at the remote trailer that will be his home for the next six months.
Here, Abbey introduces the ongoing symbol of roads. He’s been driving on the highway from Albuquerque, but in order to reach his post in the desert, he drives the last bit on a bumpy, unpaved, potentially dangerous path. Here, the road’s shift from paved to unpaved symbolizes Abbey’s step into a more authentic realm than the city—a realm where one as get as close as possible to a sense of reality that’s unmediated by the trappings of civilization.
Themes
After a cold, snowy night alone, Abbey inspects the trailer in at dawn. He has modern conveniences: a kitchenette with a refrigerator, a heater, a bathroom, and running water. It’s more luxurious than how his mother lived before Americans fought Hitler and boosted the national economy. Abbey sees mouse droppings and notes that he’s not alone in the trailer, as he seemingly shares the space with animals.
Abbey’s cohabitation with mice introduces the idea that human beings and animals are equal creatures. This scene—soon to be followed up with Abbey’s interactions with other creatures—is an important part of his argument that human beings are equal rather than superior to nature, and so they ought to be less arrogant.
Themes
Stepping out to survey the landscape, Abbey notes the wild colors and clouds of predawn. He see distant mountain peaks, which he names and situates geographically in relation to his 33,000-acre park. Addressing the name of Arches National Monument, which he thinks of as “Abbey’s country,” Abbey explains what the “Arches” are: natural formations in the rocky desert that take the shape of bridges. He describes the variety of shapes, sizes, and colors that these many arches can take.
Abbey’s joking with his readers when he renames the desert after himself. But the joke still points to an important truth about how words distort the world: Abbey laments that since language is human-made, when people use it to describe or understand nature, they are in fact defeating nature’s nonhuman essence. Words say more about the people who use them than about the reality these people want to describe—just like Abbey’s mock-arrogant name for his summer home. In future scenes, Abbey will use the uniquely human problem of naming things to highlight language’s shortcomings.
Themes
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Abbey’s thoughts on the vastness of the place make him greedy to possess the place. As he describes a particular arch in the distance, he catches himself comparing it to a god or an ogre. He promises to avoid the “personification of the natural,” because he wishes to confront nature directly, with no mediator. He wishes to gaze at a juniper tree and see it “as it is in itself, […] anti-Kantian.” The landscape is so powerful that Abbey aspires to a “brutal mysticism” in which he merges with nature, somehow surviving separate and intact as a human being.
Continuing from the last passage, Abbey delves deeper into language’s problems. By using human-centric language (“personification”) in reference to “natural” things, he will have a hard time penetrating into the nonhuman reality of the desert. His test subject here, the juniper, will remain an important symbol of his desire to see things as they really are, stripped of language. Abbey stresses this by opposing Immanuel Kant—a philosopher who believed that this reality was inaccessible to humanity. Through extended meditation, Abbey hopes to access this very layer of reality that Kant called inaccessible. A separate but related desire is Abbey’s “brutal mysticism”—an ambitious hope to break down the barrier between human, animal, and landscape. Once freed of distracting, human-made language, Abbey hopes to become closer with the earth.
Themes
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After Abbey carries in the rest of bags from his truck, gets situated, and begins breakfast, the sun rises. Abbey marvels at the “flaming globe” and drinks his coffee as he awaits his frying bacon. The sun and he “greet each other.” He notes nearby ravens and imagines their delight at the sunrise. Wishing he knew their language, Abbey would rather speak with these birds than with aliens on another planet.
“Flaming globe” is classic poetic language—more like the Greek bard Homer than a modern-day nature writer. Abbey will use this type of language throughout the book in hopes of conveying the powerful experiences he’s having. The verb “greet” is also significant, as it conveys the idea that the sun is a human shaking hands with Abbey. Language like this—in addition to Abbey’s perception that ravens can feel the human emotion of delight—illustrates Abbey’s belief that human beings are equal to nature.
Themes
