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
Merle McRae (the park’s superintendent) and Floyd Bence (the chief ranger) bring Abbey supplies for his remote trailer—water, tools, first aid, and so on—and brief him on the rounds he’s to take of the desert. McRae, a middle-aged man who’s the son of a New Mexico rancher, strikes Abbey as kindhearted. Bence is gentle, too, despite his great size; he is an archeologist by training and, like McRae, greatly prefers outdoor fieldwork to administrative office work. The men ask jokingly if Abbey is lonesome, and Abbey says no.
Having spoken out against the National Park Service in his introduction, Abbey is quick to temper his stance by describing these particular rangers as friendly and effective. But there is a reason for Bence and McRae’s goodness here: they both hate desk jobs and prefer the outdoors. This is a crucial clue to Abbey’s belief that nature makes people feel liberated and, as a result, makes them kinder toward one another and more respectful of the environment.
Themes
The three men drive around and go over Abbey’s various caretaking duties, as Abbey notes that the terrain—though unpaved and undeveloped—is certainly passable and difficult to get lost in. Abbey tries some non-potable desert water. After some time together, the sun sets. Abbey asks McRae and Bence to stay for dinner, but they must go, and he watches them drive off.
Again, the road is symbolically significant. It’s bumpy and unpaved—a reminder that Abbey is in a categorically different territory from civilization, where roads are typically paved. Abbey is establishing that the revelations about reality he’ll soon undergo are only attainable away from development.
Themes
In McRae and Bence’s sudden absence, Abbey is struck by the desert’s silence and emptiness. Looking down at his wrist, his watch now seems useless. After supper, he makes a fire of juniper wood and meditates on the surfaces of the distant rock formations, on their “unnamed unnamable” colors.
Abbey’s tongue twister represents two truths about the desert: that it cannot be described in words (“unnamable”) and that, even if it could be, this remote stretch of land has never been described in the first place (“unnamed”). This further establishes Abbey’s frustrations with language and his overwhelming sense of wonder at the natural world.
Themes
By nightfall, Venus appears in the sky, and Abbey admires it along with the birdsong around him. The juniper smoke, a smell that captures the strange essence of the American West, is sweeter than the “smoking censors Dante’s paradise.” Contemplating his fire, Abbey quotes a couplet about incense travelling up from a hearth to appease the gods.
Abbey uses the ritual aspects of juniper trees to introduce the idea that nature is a sacred place. A “censer” is an incense vessel; the incense-filled Heaven described Dante Alighieri—one of the most celebrated poets in history—is surely one of the sweetest odors one could invoke in a work of literature. Thus, Abbey’s opinion that his meager juniper bonfire smells even sweeter is an early clue that, in his mind, the real deity is not Christian but environmental. Adding to this, Abbey quotes from Henry David Thoreau’s “Light-Winged Smoke,” a poem that compares chimney smoke to Catholic incense.
Themes
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As the fire dies, Abbey takes a nighttime walk. He notes the uselessness of his flashlight, an otherwise useful instrument—it separates human beings from their surroundings. By spotlighting only one section of Earth, the flashlight seems to isolate Abbey, so he prefers to walk in the moonlight. Back at the trailer, he writes a letter to himself by the electric light, but the noise and stench of the gas generator shut him out of the natural world. So does the “man-made shell” of the trailer. Disengaging the generator before bed, the night’s tranquility returns as Abbey recalls that he is isolated from others by at least 20 miles.
The flashlight, artificially singling out small portions of the nighttime terrain, is a piece of technology that symbolizes a division between humanity and the earth. The stench and buzz of the generator, indeed the entire “man-made” trailer, serve to separate Abbey from the still and silent environment of the desert at night. By symbolically shutting off these things, then, Abbey rejects technology and instead embraces silence and solitude. By doing this, Abbey suggests the beginning stages of an important argument: that a temporary rejection of developed civilization is required for extended self-discovery and, subsequently, for coexistence with others.
Themes
