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
The tourists have left the desert, packing into their awful cars to repopulate their cities, leaving Abbey to enjoy his last day in the desert, where all the most important things happen. Tonight, he must board a plane to Denver, then on New York—but he will return next year. Unhappy and bitter, Abbey shaves his beard off. Looking like a bank clerk, he tries on a white collared shirt and a “garrote” tie in the mirror.
Equating his necktie with a “garrote” (a noose) symbolizes Abbey’s reluctance to return to society. Clearly, comparing city clothing to an execution or suicide shows the ultimate contrast between the freedom he’s been enjoying in nature and the cramped oppression he expects in New York.
Themes
Abbey thinks that the secret to living both city and desert life is balance. Thoreau insisted on a full retreat into the wilderness, but this is inadvisable. After six months in the desert, Abbey longs to see people’s faces on 42nd Street and Atlantic Avenue. He’s sick of keeping himself company, and he wants to talk to train conductors, cab drivers, cops, and the millions of other New Yorkers.
Despite his noose imagery above, this scene marks perhaps the book’s strongest moral: that the wilderness can’t be a permanent escape from society. Echoing his realizations with Ralph Newcomb in Glen Canyon, Abbey argues that people need one another. By calling out Henry David Thoreau—whose Walden advocates a permanent retreat into wilderness—Abbey distinguishes his argument about freedom and society from an important literary predecessor.
Themes
The desert has driven Abbey crazy, though he doesn’t mind. The desert invites crazies, such as a recent German visitor to his campsite, a toolmaker who drove a Porsche. Spotting Abbey’s trailer, the man invited himself over and started defending Hitler’s actions in World War II. America should have sided with the Germans, the Nazi says. Defending America—something he rarely does—Abbey grows angry enough to want to kill the man. But when he considers that the man hasn’t seen the Arches or the Grand Canyon, he wishes him well and lets him leave.
Violence is a good illustration of Abbey’s belief in the socially restorative powers of nature. Abbey acknowledges humanity’s total moral freedom in the wilderness, hearkening back to his river trip with Newcomb. As Abbey pointed out in that chapter, Newcomb could have murdered Abbey if he’d wanted. And here, Abbey could easily kill the Nazi. But in each case, because the exhilaration of the river prevented Newcomb and because the beauty of the Arches now prevents Abbey, readers see how prolonged contact with nature converts the moral freedom of the wilderness into an affection for mankind. The Nazi altercation encapsulates how nature can help people in society overcome grave differences.
Themes
In October, there’s lots of tumbleweed and aspen at Arches National Monument. The sunsets are so colorful that they are hard to believe—they are improvisatory, like God’s pizza pies. Abbey makes a final tour of the park, stopping at all the major rock formations: his children, his possessions by right of love—by divine right.
“God’s pizza” is one final poetic image—suggesting both vigorous twirling and assorted colors—for an indescribable phenomenon. The idea of possession “by right of love” is also notable: unlike industrialized society’s arrogant exploitation of nature for profit, Abbey claims that pure, emotional connection grants him ownership. This demonstrates the harmony that Abbey has established with his environment over the summer. That he qualifies this love as divine shows that, for him, his ongoing act of worshipping nature is reciprocal—Earth repays his worship by admitting him as an equal owner.
Themes
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The desert will be grateful for Abbey’s departure. But isn’t gratitude a human emotion that deserts can’t feel? The desert doesn’t feel one way or the other toward Abbey; it’s indifferent. Whether or not humanity extinguishes itself with nuclear weapons, people are equally irrelevant to the landscape. That might even be a good thing, allowing living things to start again from scratch. This is Abbey’s faith.
Despite his thoughts above on the sacred, reciprocal relationship between nature and humanity, here Abbey stops himself—as he’s done throughout the book—from treating Earth like just another human. Nature’s indifference makes it all-powerful and indifferent—like a deistic god in which Abbey has “faith.” Abbey’s line about nuclear suicide echoes Robinson Jeffers’s idea that corrupt civilizations inevitably destroy themselves and start anew. By referring to this view, Abbey concludes his anger toward human arrogance and development on a hopeful (though dark) note.
Themes
Abbey gathers all his spare juniper trunks into a bonfire—a signal to the world that goes unheeded. It doesn’t matter; all things are in motion, from the distant tumbleweeds to Abbey himself. After cleaning out the trailer, Abbey suddenly feels the urge to leave at once. He abandons his plan to give a ceremonial goodbye to the juniper by his trailer.
The famous juniper by his trailer stands in for Abbey’s closeness to the desert. By not saying goodbye, Abbey illustrates how emotionally difficult it would be to do so—like lovers parting at the end of a romantic story. This almost human relationship gives readers a clear sense of the deep spiritual connection Abbey has discovered for the earth.
Themes
At the ranger station, Abbey learns that his flight to Denver has been cancelled. A new ranger, Bob Ferris, drives him there instead. As they speed on the highway, the sight of the huge amber sunset possesses Abbey. He demands that Ferris turn the car around, but Ferris refuses, pressing on the gas—Abbey has a plane to catch. Calming down, Abbey consents, and the two men light cigars. The desert will still be the same when Abbey returns. But will he himself be the same?
Bob Ferris a minor yet important character in Abbey’s memoir. Just as Ralph Newcomb’s pipe-smoking calmness echoed Earth’s indifference in “Down the River,” here Ferris’s refusal to turn around (and his foot on the gas) symbolically represent Abbey’s immovable commitment to civilization. Though Abbey begs him for a moment, Ferris’s insistence wins out—suggesting that all human beings, no matter how devoted to nature, must bring the lessons they’ve learned in the wilderness back and apply them to the greater good of society. The appearance of the highway here—an ongoing symbol of industry and capitalism—suggests that Abbey must make a compromise. Because his obligations demand his return to living among other people, he must also find a way—as everyone must—to come to terms with their arrogance.
Themes
