Reinvention or Just Playin’ Around?: Donald Barthelme’s Use of Language in The Dead Father

In Barthelme’s novel The Dead Father, published in 1975 (just a year before Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School), the character the Dead Father and his son Thomas, two women Julie and Emma, and nineteen other men, embark on a quest to find the Golden Fleece. The Dead Father believes attaining the Golden Fleece will restore his youth; however, the Fleece turns out to be Julie’s pubic hair, which she denies him touching. And Thomas and Julie reveal they have been leading the Dead Father to his own burial all along. According to critic Carlos Azevedo, the novel works as a parody of a quest, or even as an anti-quest, as well as an allegory on several levels. Several ways this allegory can be read include the Dead Father as representing the paternal authority that each son must bury before he can become a father himself. This idea comes from Freud, and is emphasized through the novel’s frequent Oedipal allusions. The Dead Father can also represent faith in patriarchal spirituality, like Christianity, as shown through various biblical allusions throughout. Also, the Dead Father can also be read to represent modernism, in the artistic and literary sense, with Thomas symbolizing a turn towards something new, like postmodernism (Azevedo 9).

In his essay, “Uses of Language in The Dead Father” Azevedo identifies how Barthelme plays with language throughout the novel in order to reinvent language. Azevedo describes language as a possible subject of the novel, similar to other “postmodernist writers… [who] explore the instability of verbal constructs....and...the role of language shaping and mediating the world” (Azevedo 6). In other words, postmodern writers often play with the limits of language to think about how these limits, and conventions, impact culture and society. Just as we’ve learned from I-rig-ER-ay, there is no escape from the social and political implications of language or how language can burden its speakers with history. Like many postmodern writers, Barthelme plays with language hoping to come as close as possible to cleanse or somehow free language for its histories. Reading this novel and thinking about language as subject also emphasizes the self-reflexivity of his work, another identifier of postmodernism. As we’ve talked about, especially with Jameson’s chapter on Video, postmodern writers often call attention to their own techniques, causing readers to notice the elements with which reality can be created and manipulated. In The Dead Father, Barthelme uses techniques such as chiasmus, cataloging, and word play to question the possibility of whether a reinvention of authority is possible. Even though this novel is about destroying patriarchy, in the end Barthelme seems ambivalent, or unsure, about how such reinvention might actually begin.


Right away in the novel’s first passage on page 3, the Dead father is described using the rhetorical technique chiasmus: “dead, but still with us, still with us, but dead” (DF 3). (For those unfamiliar, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, chiasmus is a figure of speech, from the Greek meaning “crossing,” which two or more clauses are related to each other in inverted parallelism, which overall emphasize a larger meaning. For example, you’ve heard JFK’s famous line, "ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” Here, “you” and “country” are crisscrossed in order to emphasize the patriotic statement. Barthelme uses chiastic structure to emphasize the Dead Father’s ambiguous state of being. He is both alive and dead, the father and the destroyer. Azevedo describes The Dead Father as “the personification of all shapes of order and coherence, including language; he is the embodiment of the meaning to be sought and the control to escape from” (Azevedo 9). For example, on page 11, after a disagreement with Thomas and Julie, the Dead Father slays a grove of cardboard musicians. Let’s take a look at this passage. Here, not only do we get one of Barthelme’s masterful lists (very fun to read aloud), but also a chiasmic structure in which the Dead Father shows his authority by imperially slaying cardboard musicians from different countries, and is reproached by Julie’s sarcastic dissent. This illustrates how the Dead Father is both dominating and ridiculed, mirroring Barthelme’s larger chiasmic structure in the novel, in which he denies the old conventions of narrative, by reflexively using them to reinvent them.


This passage is also an example of one of the novel’s many inventories, or epic catalogs. But Barthelme’s catalogs are very different from what you might find in Homer’s Odyssey. Azevedo says, “There is no reality here but mainly discourse, an inventory which draws attention to itself as a mere word display, interfering with narrative transmission” (10). The disrupting effect of such a long interruption to the narrative allows readers’ attention to be refocused on the use of language itself, again emphasizing the novel as anti-epic, anti-quest, and instead proposing new alternatives to the traditional. Other inventories in the novel include the list of types of fathers (136-137) and the grocery list for the mostly absent Mother (169). The same effect of disruption, and emphasis on language as merely language, is also achieved through the Dead Father’s speech on pages 49 to 51. Let’s take a look here. The Dead Father delivers an incomprehensible speech! The only occasion for the speech seems to be that the Dead Father “has prepared some remarks” and the audience patiently lights their cigarettes and listens (49). At the end of the speech, the audience applauses, and Emma asks, “What did it mean?” The Dead Father replies, “it meant I made a speech” (51). This passage is meant to draw our attention to a meaningless or illogical use of language, which reminded me of Gertrude Stein’s line of poetry (“ a rose is a rose is a rose”...”, in which words are said and repeated to the point their lose their meaning and become defamiliarized. In the case of the Dead Father’s speech, his language is not persuasive, political, or motivating, but literally empty and meaningless, somewhat like the noise we discussed with Pynchon. This reiterates Barthelme's critique of paternal law, as he calls for possible reinvention.


Some of Barthelme’s most obvious and extended departures from conventional and logical language are demonstrated by the novel’s four dialogues between Julie and Emma, which appear in a entirely different tone, style and structure from the rest of the novel (23-27, 60-64, 86-90, 147-155). In these passages it appears the young women discuss more than one topic at once, on everything ranging from their college majors to the hyperpersonal topics of sexuality. One way to read these conversations is to think about how Barthelme is situating the reader’s role in the dialogue, as active participant, voyeur, eavesdropper, etc. In her essay “Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father: “Girls Talk” and the Displacement of the Logos” critic Jeanette McVicker describes the women’s four conversations’ as “teasing] the reader into participation, but in a totally manipulative way” (364). By the nature of these dialogues, the reader cannot tell who is speaking or when, or how the lines are inflected, or perhaps if some of the lines are even spoken aloud at all. Overall, this causes the reader to feel at odds with these passages, and as if she has fewer tools to understand them. McVicker finds the third conversation between the women the most conventional, or linear. I disagree; I find the first and second more accessible. But in the third one, McVicker points out, there are recognizable topics, such as spirituality, nature, and childhood, but even so, the conversation as a symbol of communication does not hold because the text communicates very little. The reader’s role here is ambiguous, just like the nature of the Dead Father himself. Does the reader follow her traditional conventions for reading, or begin to develop new tools to access these passages?

Another way to read these conversations is by considering the historic alienation of the female voice in patriarchal society, or as an attempt to displace patriarchy. In this way, readers feel a sense of alienation while trying to make logical sense of the conversations. But readers could also recognize how Julie and Emma are subverting the traditional rules of dialogue and narrative. Traditional conventions include things like a linear and logical structure, and use of dialogue tags to identify who is speaking. McVicker points out how at the end of the first dialogue, one of the women says, “women together changing that which can and ought to be changed” (24). This clue allows readers to make the connection that again, Barthelme is interested in the idea of disrupting authority. But later, near the end of the last dialogue, the line, “not getting anywhere, not making any progress” (151) is repeated twice, questioning Julie and Emma’s tactics in reinventing power structures, and whether they are actually able reinvent anything substantially as women in a world still controlled by men.

In the novel the women's’ experience is described much differently than Thomas’s, who seems like the “new” Dead Father in training. Traditionally, patriarchy does not allow any kind of dissent or difference, as it threatens the paternal law (McVicker). Thus, the binary of order (of the powerful) and opposition (of the powerless) is established and difficult to break. During Julie and Emma’s second conversation, the women illustrate their sexual difference, and marginalization, by discussing self-respect (63). Let’s turn to page 63 and take a look. Here, McVicker notices how the women have “been stripped of their self-respect by their (non)-status within the patriarchal order...and this is how their demoralization expresses itself (371). In other words, this passage shows how females have lost dignity and self-worth after centuries of living under paternal law. Additionally, McVicker points out during the last conversation one of the women says, “Asked if I wanted to play. I noticed that all of the pieces were black” (149). Thus, the women noticed that paternal law, or the game, is not stacked in their favor, and in actuality, very much against it, so through these four dialogues, they’ve decided to discuss, or communicate, in a way that operates outside of the rules. This opposition can also be read in how the dialogues are written, outside of conventional narrative. But, if under paternal law, there is the right way, and the highway, this is a clear binary system. So if Julie and Emma chose the highway, or dissent, they are still working within the binary of paternal law, just not in the way that is expected of them. In this way, I believe Bartelme is pointing out how complete reinvention from paternal law may not be possible but is necessary to still question and critique.

This tension between the old and new, and whether an alternative concept is possible, is one of the main threads of the novel and extends into the novel’s text-within-a-text, “A Manual for Sons.” The “Manual,” is introduced on page 108-109 as a “frayed, tattered, disintegrating….printed on pieces of pumpernickel...translated anonymously from English to English….given as a gift to Thomas and Julie.” Thus, this text’s status and authority is questionable, and we can read “Manual” as satirical (McVicker). Throughout “Manual,” women are seldom mentioned, but when they are, they are described as a threat to men or as objectified, sexualized, and Lolitia-fied daughters. In the “Manual”, Barthelme is ridiculing the marginalization of women within paternal law, pointing to women’s only roles as virgins, wives, or prostitutes, as we have discussed before with Irig-ER-ay’s essay “Women in the Market.” While Barthelme’s satire criticizes the perpetuation of such oppressive law, he does little to offer practical solutions. Instead, Barthelme suggests, tongue in cheek in the section “Patricide,” “it is not necessary to slay your father, time will slay him..Your true task as a son…[is to] become your father, but a paler, weaker version of him...Fatherhood can be, if not conquered, at least “turned down” in this generation--by the combined efforts of all of us together” (145). Thus, Barthelme seems ambivalent about any sharp, radical change, but instead seems to offer a more subtle and enduring kind of resistance.

In The Dead Father, Barthelme uses various techniques and world play to explore the possibility of a reinvention of the authority of paternal law. While Barthelme plays with the concept of destroying patriarchal structures, the novel itself can be read as not unenjoyable beginning to the discussion, while most particulars are left vague and incomprehensible.


Works Cited

"Definition of Chiasmus in English:." Chiasmus: Definition of Chiasmus in Oxford Dictionary (American English) (US). Oxford Dictionaries, 2016. Web. 29 Feb. 2016.

Azevedo, Carlos. “Uses of Language in Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father.” Uses of Language: Creation, Research, and Teaching in Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at FILLM, Porto, 26-27 October 2001, altered 2004. Web.

McVicker, Jeanette. “Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father: “Girls Talk” and the Displacement of the Logos.” boundary 2. 16 2-3 (Winter-Spring 1989): 363-390. Web.

Zupan’s The Ploughmen

       And he told the deputy that the gulls began to arrive. They appeared first as minute white tufts against the green of the river trees and he turned and made a pass going away and then suddenly they were among the furrows behind the plow, as though lie the soldiers of myth they sprang from the ground itself. He wondered how they found him and thought they may have followed the dust cloud or perhaps like wolves or hounds on a blood scent the could smell the new-turned earth. He threw the tractor into neutral and sat watching as the birds gorged themselves on tiny infant mice he had exposed from under small rocks and glistening worms as long as garter snakes, and crickets and partridge nestlings and even above the pothering of the engine he could hear the gulls scream. There seemed to be no communion among them. They fought over every mouthful, the most successful of them gagging down pieces that would have choked a hyena and in the chaos of screeches there were times it seemed they would set upon one another until one gruesome bird remained, engorged and wallowing through the furrows unable even to raise his bloodied wings to fly.  (40)

Kim Zupan’s The Ploughmen explores humans’ relationship to the land and how this relationship affects us. While Val’s wife Glenda is “swallowed up whole” by the land, both Gload and Val himself find solace and comfort in the land’s beauty, formidability, and ironically enough, its privacy. Working as a motif throughout the book, the gulls in the passage above represent humans’ unapologetic voyeurism, or, how we incessantly compare ourselves with others in order to feel accepted, loved, or better about our own situations. Like gulls, Zupan recognizes how we prey upon the disadvantages of others in order to feel adequate about our own lives. But both Val and Gload recognize this human flaw and instead seek a simpler and less judgemental relationship with their surroundings.

Val and Gload bond over their shared love of the Montana landscape and the comfort it provides them; however this comfort is often interrupted by the judgements of others. Just as the gulls “gorged themselves on tiny infant mice...exposed,” Deputy Wexler preys upon others’ misfortune to obtain power, which Gload points out to Val midway in the novel, and which Gload seems to rationalize explains his preference for Val’s companionship. However, Val is guilty of this “gorging” himself, as he must document the deaths of the hikers to make his living. This “gorging” also explain Val’s severe reaction at the doctor's’ party early in the novel, in which he cannot keep himself from comparing his own life with the affluent and feeling threatened by their wealth, good looks, and hold over his wife Glenda. In this way, both Val and Gload are aware of how “there seem[s] to be no communion among” men, demonstrated by their withdraw from conventional society.

While Gload attempts to differentiate himself from this metaphorical “gorging” by making a life literally murdering lots of people, Val struggles to find connection with others, and is plagued by the guilt and unresolved feelings from coming upon his mother’s suicide as a child. In this way, Val cannot escape seeing himself as the “one gruesome bird remain[ing]...unable to raise his bloodied wings to fly” or overcome this event’s hold on his psyche. It isn’t until the near end of the novel that Val begins to show signs of self-recovery when he cannot photograph the corpse of a teen girl who took her life by burying herself. For Val, this change in behavior not only represents his acceptance of his mother’s death but also his ability to finally forgive himself from the guilt and misfortune of his discovery of similar scenes. 

Zupan’s critique of the current human condition is reminiscent of Laurence Shames’s “The More Factor” in which he explores our relationship with excess. While Gload is a serial killer, readers can empathize with his rejection of conventional society and him seeking unlikely companionship with Val, which might be what saves Val from getting “swallowed up” by his own despair.

What is Post-Western?

The 1996 film Lone Star directed by John Sayles tells the tale of  Sheriff Sam Deeds and his search for the truth into a decades-old murder case. Sam must find the truth for himself, which comes with its own personal disappointments and complexities. Sam must both accept and reject the mythology of his father the great Buddy Deeds, defining the film as ‘post-Western,” in which traditional conventions of the Western genre are complicated and challenged.

Throughout of the majority of the film, Sam Deeds rejects the idea of his father as a legendary hero, but once he finally learns the circumstances of Wade’s death, he realizes that upsetting the entire town’s conception of the legend Buddy Deeds legend is more trouble than it’s worth. This shows that Sam Deeds must both work with and against regional ideology in order to make personal and public sense of his father’s legacy.  Critic Neal Campbell defines ‘post-Western’ as “working both with and against the mythic frame of the genre, deliberately invoking and critiquing many of its guiding values while pointing the audience beyond classic Western ideologies” (Campbell 206). Thus, while Sam initially rejects the town’s celebration of his father, Sam later learns that the Buddy Deeds myth serves a purpose in uniting townspeople of different backgrounds and classes, such as Otis and Hollis, Mercedes and the town’s business sector, for example. After their final confrontation, during which Hollis reminds Sam that if the identity of the skeletal remains gets out, people might figure Buddy Deeds as the killer. But Sam has learned, and responds,” Buddy is a god-damned legend. He can handle it.” This shows that Sam has both personally rejected but also accepted his father’s public fame, therefore, illuminating the complexity of which the past can affect characters but not dictate their actions and future.

The final scene of the film also serves to complicate the traditional Western cross-racial love-interest trope, exposing another post-Western twist. Pilar learns from Sam that they share a father, Buddy Deeds, making the lovers half-siblings. The scene is tense and viewers worry. But as Pilar can no longer have children, the couple decides they can “Start from scratch,” and not let the past, or their shared biological bloodline, interfere.  The line “Start from scratch” acts as a motif in the film, also explored by the Colonel, his son Chet, and Chet’s grandfather Otis, to express  the idea that such traditional “borders” obstructing racial, familial, and intimate relationships can be reexamined, especially as a way to rewrite hurtful assumptions made in the past.

For Westerns, the past is significant and plays an important role in understanding the relationships between people and the land; however, the post-Western encourages its audience to go one step farther and call the past into question, just as Pilar signs off, “All that other stuff, all that history? To hell with it, right? Forget the Alamo.”

Works Cited

Lone Star. Dir. John Sayles. A Sony Pictures Classics Release of a Castle Rock Entertainment         Presentation, 1996.

Neil Campbell. "From Story to Film: Brokeback Mountain's "In-Between" Spaces." Canadian         Review of American Studies 39.2 (2009): 205-220. Project MUSE. Web. 21 Feb. 2016.        <https://muse.jhu.edu/>.

Ninja Camp: Pynchon’s Satire of the Commercial Narrative’s “Fictive Time” in Vineland

Throughout Vineland, Pynchon critiques consumer culture of American mainstream media and the techniques used to create our summer blockbusters and weeknight sitcoms. The novel is packed with incessant references to “the Tube,” as well Pynchon’s own use of some of the elements that create what critic Frederic Jameson describes as “ the simulacrum of fictive time” (75).  In particular, Pynchon’s writing style during DL’s flashbacks from her life as a ninja assassin satirize the stereotypical romance, slapstick, and flashiness of American mainstream media. Throughout these cheesy scenes, Pynchon plays with key temporal elements traditionally used to create and break “fictive time,” such as coincidence and interruption, in order to draw attention to our ceaseless and empty consumption of media.

    Pynchon calls attention to coincidence as one element that can achieve “fictive time,” or the effect of realistic timing that is actually manipulated in order to captivate a mainstream audience.   In his chapter “Video” in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,  Fredric Jameson describes “fictive time” as “one of the various film techniques” in which a “movie screen [can] radically foreshorten reality as the clock ticks” (74). This idea is an identifier of postmodernism because the representation of reality has become more important the reality itself. While mainstream viewers are captivated by commercial use of “fictive time,” Pynchon hopes to disrupt his readers from this reverie. More specifically, Pynchon uses coincidence as a temporal technique used commercially to create “fictive time,” namely the coincidental scene in which Prairie and DL meet. Here, Pynchon uses an aspect of magical realism to aid this coincidence. At the wedding, DL carries with her a “small silvery unit” that can detect her partner Takeshi Fumimota’s business card, which Prairie carries with her (99).  Just as readers are coached to suspend their disbelief in situations of magical realism, so are they taught to do so in matters of Dickensian coincidence, which aids the writer’s development of “fictive time,” as the story is sped up. Pynchon satirizes this illusion of seamless “fictive time” and thus draws our attention to the temporal techniques that achieve this effect.  Therefore, Pynchon is playing with coincidence as one the “various techniques of film narrative,” to show how preposterous it is that mainstream audiences will suspend their disbelief for such ridiculous devices. But this serendipitous meeting between DL and Prairie foreshadows Pynchon’s continued play with temporarily for the next three chapters, allowing his readers the simultaneous joy and discomfort of incessant interruption.

    As Pynchon continues DL’s flashbacks, he interrupts his own seamless, action-packed prose to refocus readers’ attention on the original frame of the story. In this way, Pynchon is calling attention to his own play with the structure of the narrative, causing readers to notice the elements with which he creates and manipulates reality.   Jameson argues the medium of video, particularly experimental video, best captures our postmodern connection to technology because the medium itself draws attention to its own technology (74). This is what Pynchon is doing with his prose, causing readers to question why he is making such elements visible when he has the ability as a writer to easily mask them. For example, Prairie is captivated by a photograph of her mother, in which she can experience her mother’s friendship with DL: “Prairie could feel in the bright California colors, sharpened up pixel by pixel into deathlessness” (115). Here, Prairie  continues to gaze at the photo, imagining a conversation between the two young women. But even in Pynchon’s flawless prose here we notice that Prairie’s aware of the “California colors, sharpened up pixel by pixel into deathlessness,” showing that Pynchon has made the medium, or the technology and its “pixel[s]”, visible for us. This interruption, and visibility, allows readers to question their own relationship with media, especially when photographs and videos have the ability to create a sense of “deathlessness,” the ultimate distraction.

And he will not stop; Pynchon continues to tease readers with another interruption to his conventional illusion of “fictive time,” continuing to disrupt the comfort of a conventional narrative, and draw our attention to how he is constructing his prose. While exploring the files of her mother, Prairie is jolted from her sleepy trance, “which the unit promptly sensed, beginning to blink, following this with a sound chip playing the hook from the Everlys’ ‘Wake Up, Little Susie’ over and over again” (115). Thus, as Prairie is losing herself in the fiction she is building when constructing meaning out of all the files and this particular photograph of her mother, she is jolted awake by the computer that can somehow magically detect her falling asleep. This interruption comes from a conscious machine’s choice in pop music, alluding to a television’s quintessential use of interruption, the commercial advertisement. And just as a sitcom’s plot arch is determined by commercial timing, Pynchon suggests that now it is the  technology and not the story that can unfortunately determine a narrative’s structure.

Pynchon’s interruptions refocus our attention on the frame of the story and also call attention to Pynchon’s interest in what label him as a Postmodern author. Pynchon does not allow readers to forget what they’re reading, thus calling for readers’ heightened attention to the world around them. Jameson poses that our consumption of such commercial narratives are often forgotten due to their reliance on such enchanting and manipulative techniques. Jameson describes how one of the“most interesting feature[s]” of video production is that “out of the rigorously nonfiction languages of video, commercial television manages to produce the simulacrum of fictive time” (75).  Here, Jameson uses “simulacrum” to mean the representation of reality and not reality itself. Writers achieve this verisimilitude of timing in a commercial narrative while in actuality using many temporal techniques to speed up, skip, or slow down certain events and details.  Pynchon seeks to remind readers and call attention to such temporal techniques to show his interest in how our attention span is changing and being shaped and manipulated by our constant consumption this media.

While Pynchon might not support the mass hypnosis of ninja flicks and prime time Tube, he expertly understands how such narratives are constructed and can reflect these same effects in his prose. However, with his novel, Pynchon can disrupt the illusion of “fictive time” in many different ways, allowing us to reflect on our relationship with media. Instead of consuming such narratives mindlessly, Pynchon forces us to do the work, making our entertainment experience that much more meaningful.

Works Cited

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke         UP, 1991. Print.

Pynchon, Thomas. Vineland. Boston: Little, Brown, 1990. Print.

Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses

Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses tells the tale of John Grady Cole, a sixteen-year-old young man who decides to leave his Texas home for Mexico to find work after his grandfather has passed away.  Cole’s best friend Lacey Rawlins joins him, and together they ride on and end up caring for Jimmy Blevins, a younger boy who brings with him nothing but trouble. Throughout the novel McCarthy romanticizes the desperado lifestyle, landscape, and mythic role of horses, but McCarthy’s portrayal of the protagonist John Grady Cole rewrites the stereotype as a more sensitive and even androgynous being, showing that love and compassion, not violence, can define the American cowboy.

    In her essay “About Men,” travel writer Gretel Ehrlich argues the cowboys she spent time with while passing through Wyoming overturn the popular stereotype of the cowboy as strong, silent and stoic; instead, Ehrlich contends, the cowboy is a “ balancing act between male and female, manliness and femininity,” which is also a more fitting way to describe the disposition of the McCarthy’s John Grady Cole (84).  Erlich’s main point is that the cowboy is sensitive namely due to his work with animals. Cole is nothing if not a horse whisperer. After breaking his first horses at la hacienda, he continues to build relationships with them and speaks to them softly in Spanish (translated): “I am the commander of the mares . . .I and I alone. Without charity

from my hands you have nothing. Neither food nor water nor children. I am the one who brings

the mares of the mountains, the young mares, the savage ones, and the mares that burn with

passion” (Priola).  Here, we can see that Cole leads the horses with authority but that he also respects them for their own private “passions” and pasts, especially the mares. Thus, we can see he is not only a lonely desperado who has killed a man and cauterized his own wounds with a pistol barrel, but that he represents qualities this, as Erlich reminds us, “Ranchers are midwives, hunters, nurturers, providers, and conservationists all at once” (84).

    Just as a god or higher being might contain the multitudes of the masculine and feminine and all in between and beyond, McCarthy aims to develop Cole in this way. His love for horses and Alejandra, his sensitive conscience, and his inability to commit even vengeful violence show that he is a cowboy more clearly defined by humility and selflessness.

Works Cited

Ehrlich, Gretel. "About Men." The Solace of Open Spaces. New York: Penguin, 1985. 82-85.         Print.

McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. New York: Vintage, 1993. Print.

Priola, Marty. Translations: All the Pretty Horses, page 128. CormacMcCarthy.com. The Cormac     McCarthy Society, 2016. Web. 14 Feb. 2016.

Karen Russell's "Proving Up"

     In Karen Russell’s short story “Proving Up,” eleven-year-old Miles leaves his family’s Nebraskan farm on horseback to intercept a rumored government inspector who audits for the Homestead Act of 1872. The last condition of the Homestead Act requires the dwelling must have a glass window, which Miles carries across the plains to share with a neighboring family who is also hoping to “prove up” (86). Unfortunately, for Miles “proving up” proves fatal, as Russell demonstrates by weaving motifs of blindness ultimately symbolizing the West’s ruinous obsession with ownership and materialism.

            Miles and his horse Nore fight across the blizzarding plains in blindness, causing Miles to realize the price he is willing to pay for dignity. Miles becomes aware that “If the Hox glass is in pieces, I won’t ever go back home. I’d rather die here than return to our dugout without it” (102). At this point, Miles’s protection of the pane of glass, whose function is to protect a dwelling’s inhabitants from exterior elements, has taken control over him, along with the paternal pressures that govern his family life and wider culture. Luckily, the glass has not yet shattered, and Miles is able to continue when a branch cuts his eyelid, blinding his sight with blood.  Miles admits, “Outside of my mind I can barely see” (100). Here, Miles has finally assimilated into the West’s culture and has become fatally obsessed with his ownership of the Window procuring his family’s land title. 

Miles’s protection of the glass consumes him. He continues through the blizzard on foot, “I crouch over the burlap like something feeding--my skin becoming one more layer of protection for the glass…The elements seal my eyes, so that I have to keep watch over the Window blindly in with my arms” (102). He nurses the Window as if he were a mother and it his child. The window’s importance is further emphasized by its capitalization as a proper noun or name throughout the text. Thus, as Miles’s protection deepens, as does his blindness as his eyes completely “seal.” This change marks Miles, like his father, as a man of the frontier.

  Thus, Russell illustrates for readers that it was not the homesteaders who owned the land, but, as Death hauntingly reminds Miles near the end of the story, “No, you are mistaken, sir. The land owns you” (109).

Willa Cather’s novel O Pioneers!

    In Willa Cather’s novel O Pioneers! Alexandra is unique in her ambition, strength, and independence as a female landowner on the bleak Nebraskan prairie; however, these traits also make her an outsider in a world governed by men. After years of labor and sacrifice, she attains wealth and many friendships; however,  her path to success and role has caused her to overlook some of her own personhood, namely, her more intimate and romantic desires. Thus, Alexandra is unable to develop fully as individual due to of the limitations placed on her by the rules of patriarchy and the American West.

    To help demonstrate Alexandra’s individuality, Cather provides a parallel character,  Ivar, a deeply religious Russian eccentric, with whom Alexandra has remained friends despite her brothers’ schemes to put Ivar away in an asylum.  Ivar prefers to live in the wilderness and distrusts civilization.  Alexandra not only advocates for the aging Ivar but takes him in when he can no longer make his own living.  Many characters complain of Ivar’s differences, but Alexandra accepts him, out of kindness and commiseration.

    However, Ivar understands something about self-determination that Alexandra misses  during her lifetime of prudence. After Emil and Marie’s murders, when Alexandra is inconsolably wandering the graveyard, Ivar tells the housemaid Signa, why he chooses to live barefoot:

        “It is for indulgence of the body. From my youth I have had a strong, rebellious body, and have been subject to every kind of temptation. Even in age my temptations are prolonged. It was necessary to make some allowances; and the feet, as I understand it, are free members. There is no divine prohibition for them in the Ten commandments…I indulge them without harm to  anyone, even trampling in filth when my desires are low. They are quickly cleaned again.” (154)

Like Alexandra, Ivar was born with a “strong, rebellious[ness],” but unlike her, he has learned to balance his self-discipline with some indulgence. Had Alexandra embraced such wisdom earlier on, she might have made room to act on her own passions and to not overlook the intimacy brewing between her younger brother Emil and neighbor Marie. However, in the end Ivar’s bare feet seem of little consequence compared to his other unconventional behaviors. It is unlikely that at this time in history Alexandra would have been allowed to pursue both roles of a strong female and male.  Thus, Ivar offers knowledge that Alexandra simply cannot access while attempting to assimilate to life in the American West, showing that even Cather considered obstacles to the American Dream.