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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
April is an especially windy month in the desert. Dust storms constantly flare up and make the terrain feel uninhabitable. But after prolonged exposure, one learns to appreciate—and even to love—the harsh wind as part of a greater environmental whole.
That Abbey can learn to love even the miserable sandstorms is proof that he’s beginning to find a holistic bond with nature. Like the Neruda epigraph at the beginning of the book, this bond must include both the sweet and the ugly parts of nature.
Themes
Each dawn—his favorite hour—Abbey admires the sunrise while seated on his trailer’s stoop, his bare feet on the bare earth. The jays and ravens, he feels, agree that this is the best time of day. Taking in the birds’ songs and aimless games, Abbey imagines what they might be saying to each other. He reminds himself that on one hand, it’s foolish to personify animals—but the emotion in their chirping is undeniable.
The image of Abbey’s bare feet in the sand, which will come up again, suggests Abbey’s attempt to bond entirely with the landscape, sand to skin. This bond extends to animals, as well: by implying that birds play games and feel happy, just like human beings do, Abbey argues that they are no lesser than human beings.
Themes
Abbey doesn’t often see the mice in his trailer, but the fact that they might attract rattlesnakes makes him uneasy. He confirms his fear one morning when he finds one such rattler sleeping beneath his stoop. After debating whether to shoot it, Abbey decides that it’s his job, as a ranger, to protect it. Afraid to wake the snake with movement, Abbey sits still, studying its shape, and he describes the dangers this species of snake presents to human beings. As he carefully removes the rattler with a shovel, it awakens and tries to strike. Abbey warns the snake to stay away, under pain of death.
Abbey’s interactions with this rattlesnake offer a concrete example of how he believes human beings and animals ought to coexist. Most people would kill a poisonous snake—and indeed, Abbey considers doing so—but the fact that he saves it indicates his willingness to coexist with all parts of nature, the good and the harmful. That he reasons with the rattlesnake—warning it to stay away—grants is a human-like dignity that furthers this argument.
Themes
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The warning is useless, as Abbey soon discovers more rattlesnakes near his trailer. But at the same time, he also finds a harmless gopher snake nearby. He domesticates it in his trailer and trains it to eat the mice that attract the unwanted rattlers. Soon, the gopher snake is so well-trained that it’s content to spend afternoons wrapped around Abbey’s waist as he makes his ranger rounds, to the delight of tourists. A cold-blooded creature, the snake absorbs Abbey’s body temperature; they are “compatible.”
The gopher snake symbolizes Abbey’s ability to coexist with animals. Just like Abbey sinking his bare feet in the sand, he bonds with the snake skin-to-skin in a way that suggests a kind of symbiotic connection. Their “compatibility” is compelling evidence against humanity’s typical belief in its own superiority over other species—a central argument in Abbey’s book.
Themes
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Though the snake eventually leaves him, Abbey discovers it one last time a month later, engaged in what seems to be a mating dance with another snake. On all fours, Abbey sneaks up on the two “lovers,” imagining the “passion” in their strange “ballet.” They see Abbey and chase him off, and Abbey chides himself for intruding.
The snake’s departure acknowledges the reality that animals and human beings aren’t exactly the same creatures. But Abbey’s words when he finds the snake again—imagining the creature’s romantic emotion (“love” and “passion”) and artistic cultivation (“ballet”)—confirms that he sees aspects of himself in animals.
Themes
As Abbey ruminates on the “sympathy” and “mutual aid” of these snakes, he stops himself in the midst of his human-centric thinking. He reminds himself that the language of human beings cannot be applied to the natural world; human and animal realms are completely different. And yet, the snakes’ emotions are obvious—Abbey thinks that to deny this is the same as a Muslim denying that women have souls. Coyotes, dolphins, and all animals on Earth have a mystic truth to their actions and language. Though inaccessible to Abbey, this language is nonetheless real. He quotes a couplet which praises animals for not complaining or “weep[ing] for their sins.” Though human beings often claim equality only among one another, Abbey concludes that all living things on Earth are kindred.
Abbey’s argument that human beings and animals are equals becomes more complicated in this scene, as the snakes probably don’t have human feelings (“sympathy,” “mutual aid”). To suggest that they do might be to distort reality, to tell lies about nature. Abbey warns, as he does elsewhere, about the power of language to misrepresent the world. In this way, language poses a paradoxical threat to Abbey’s deep desire to bond with nature. By reading human emotions in nonhuman animals—even in pro-animal poetry like Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” quoted here—one inadvertently becomes even further removed from it.
Themes
