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
Ten years prior to writing Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey spent two summers as a park ranger at Arches National Monument near Moab, Utah. The time he spent alone as a ranger forms the subject of this book. The park, long since developed, was a “primitive place” back then. Because the tourist season was light, Abbey spent great stretches of time in solitude, keeping a journal.
Immediately, Abbey asserts the classic environmentalist argument that human beings defile nature. The word “primitive” indicates a state of moral purity, not a regression to living like cavemen. This distinction will propel the book’s argument that wilderness is essential to civilized life.
Themes
In the following memoir, Abbey has tried to create a “world of words” that represents, rather than merely describes, the desert as he experienced it. Abbey apologizes for writing more about the appearances and “surfaces” of the things he saw in the desert, rather than their “true underlying reality.” Abbey concludes that appearances are all human beings can truly experience, so they’re good enough for him.
The phrase “world of words” strikes at the core of Abbey’s frustration with language. Though words never perfectly succeed in communicating life, Abbey will repeatedly push his language to its limit—as poets do, by using rhyme and meter to supplement the definitional meaning of words. In doing so, Abbey will try to give readers the most accurate sense of his time in the desert. This is a lot like Abbey’s opinion about reality: in trying to use superficial words to penetrate into a richer, lived reality, Abbey highlights a similar difference in the way people experience the world. The five senses only acquaint people with sensory “surfaces,” but beneath these surfaces is an “underlying reality” which people can never know.
Themes
Though grateful for some of his fellow hard-working park rangers, Abbey warns readers that he will be harsh on the useless and business-minded people of the National Park Service for not doing enough to protect the desert from development since his time there. He urges readers who are inspired by his book to do more than mere tourism: to get lost in nature, away from their cars, society, and technology.
As well as lambasting arrogant bureaucrats in the National Park Service, Abbey also places the onus of respecting and protecting the environment on ordinary people. He points to a crucial act of protest that park visitors can engage in: simply leaving one’s car and discovering the liberty of a life in the wild. The two forces Abbey points out here—financial greed and human freedom—will stand in stark opposition throughout the book.
Themes
Abbey includes a couplet from Pablo Neruda’s “The Heights of Macchu Picchu” as an epigraph: “Give me silence, water, hope / Give me struggle, iron, volcanoes.”
Neruda’s poem—a celebration of nature that centers on the Incan city of Machu Picchu—ends on this balance between two sides of nature: the calm and life-giving side versus the fierce and brutal one. By celebrating all of nature—both the sweet and the harsh—Neruda connects spiritually to the city’s dead spirits and suggests that nature will outlast humanity. This spiritual connection to nature’s infinitude is exactly what Abbey strives to convey in Desert Solitaire.
Themes
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