Desert Solitaire

by

Edward Abbey

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on Desert Solitaire makes teaching easy.

Wilderness, Society, and Liberty Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Wilderness, Society, and Liberty  Theme Icon
Nature, Wonder, and Religion Theme Icon
Language and Reality Theme Icon
Humanity, the Environment, and Arrogance Theme Icon
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  Theme Icon

In Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey’s politically charged memoir of a summer largely spent alone as a park ranger at Arches National Monument, Abbey emphasizes the importance of the wilderness on several levels. In nearly every scene, Abbey describes his own love of nature and the way it empowers him, highlighting how the wilderness is important to him on a personal level. As Abbey comes to understand the personal rewards of desert seclusion, he realizes that everyone would benefit from the kind of freedom and solitude that’s found in nature. He thus emphasizes nature’s importance on a political level, urging the United States government to preserve its national parks so that all people can enjoy nature. Combining these two perspectives, the personal and the political, Abbey argues that the solitude of the untamed wilderness empowers individuals in a way that makes them respect themselves and one another, which in turn allows people to coexist peacefully and democracy to function smoothly.

Abbey starts with the premise that the best societies are those founded on “personal liberty.” He seems suspicious of all governments—especially modern America—but several times he praises the “heroi[c]” Thomas Jefferson, whose 1776 Declaration of Independence cast off the English monarchy. Abbey also champions the writer Thomas Paine (who was hostile to all monarchies) as well as the U.S. Constitution, the first modern government blueprint based on “inalienable” human rights. Elsewhere, Abbey’s argument for gun rights also echoes this document. Abbey also celebrates the government of the dispossessed Navajos, a system once based on the “liberty and dignity” of its citizens. By invoking Native Americans and the Founding Fathers, two cultures committed to personal “liberty,” Abbey tells readers that freedom is an essential element of his politics.

After suggesting that the freedom is essential for people in society, Abbey shows that extended self-discovery in nature is one sure way to find it. Though difficult at first, seclusion in nature soon offers Abbey a newfound independence from other human beings. By taking his dinners outside in the open desert, for instance—rather than inside his manmade trailer—he can escape loneliness and achieve an “equanimity,” or calmness, that he could never get in society. More than helping him feel comfortable in his own skin, being alone in nature forces Abbey to meet many practical needs entirely on his own. He devotes long passages to his search for clean water, his developing survival instincts, and his trial-by-error navigation of the desert. These solitary adventures give him a growing sense of dignity and self-worth: he soon describes a growing “affection,” even a “love,” for himself. He calls this self-empowering benefit of spending time alone in nature the “delirious exhilaration of independence,” suggesting that freedom, which Abbey idealizes and regards as vital to society, can be found through solitary experiences in the wilderness.

The newfound sense of liberty and dignity that Abbey develops from spending time alone in nature soon improves his coexistence with the people he meets. The undeveloped terrain forces residents of Moab, Utah to be “self-reliant.” Since these people can provide for themselves, Abbey observes, they are “friendly, hospitable, [and] honest.” This is early proof that a solitary, rugged life can have social as well as personal benefits. Abbey eventually discovers this same hospitality in himself: after some months away from the city, taking a river trip with his friend Ralph Newcomb, Abbey finds a renewed his “affection” not only for himself but also for “human kind in general.” This growing camaraderie culminates in the book’s conclusion, when a Nazi passes through Arches National Monument and defends Hitler. Abbey is so enraged that he “could have opened [the man’s] skull,” but he lets him go in peace, as the man “hadn’t seen the Arches yet or even the Grand Canyon.” Abbey is rarely shy about his violent impulses. That the simple existence of the desert has neutralized this conflict gives readers a convincing sense of nature’s peacemaking powers.

By showing these social benefits of solitude and independence, Abbey concludes that preserved, uninhabited wilderness is essential to civilization. Abbey’s emphatic wish is that readers treat his book as a manual, to unplug and try a retreat into the wilds. (He gives extended survival instructions for this purpose.) The occasional escape into rugged nature, Abbey promises, will help readers live more comfortably—first with themselves, and then with one another in towns and cities. But Abbey’s story has symbolic as well as practical meaning: even if city-dwellers never leave the metropolis, he argues, they “need wilderness whether or not [they] ever set foot in it.” In this way, wildlife represents “hope,” a symbolic “possibility of escape” from industrial civilization. If his readers don’t actually escape into nature, then they can at least rely on the promise that nature holds of an unplugged, empowering, and independent life. For these reasons—both the actual and the symbolic freedom offered by undeveloped nature—Abbey declares that “wilderness complements and completes civilization.”

Related Themes from Other Texts
Compare and contrast themes from other texts to this theme…

Wilderness, Society, and Liberty ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Wilderness, Society, and Liberty appears in each chapter of Desert Solitaire. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
How often theme appears:
chapter length:
Get the entire Desert Solitaire LitChart as a printable PDF.
Desert Solitaire PDF

Wilderness, Society, and Liberty Quotes in Desert Solitaire

Below you will find the important quotes in Desert Solitaire related to the theme of Wilderness, Society, and Liberty .
Cliffrose and Bayonets Quotes

What the rabbit has lost in energy and spirit seems added, by processes too subtle to fathom, to my own soul. I try but cannot feel any sense of guilt. I examine my soul: white as snow. Check my hands: not a trace of blood. No longer do I feel so isolated from the sparse and furtive life around me, a stranger from another word. I have entered into this one.

Related Characters: Edward Abbey (speaker)
Page Number: 34
Explanation and Analysis:
Polemic Quotes

It will be objected that a constantly increasing population makes resistance and conservation a hopeless battle. This is true. Unless a way is found to stabilize the nation’s population, the parks cannot be saved. Or anything else worth a damn. Wilderness preservation, like a hundred other good causes, will be forgotten under the overwhelming pressure of a struggle for mere survival and sanity in a completely urbanized, completely industrialized, ever more crowded environment.

Related Characters: Edward Abbey (speaker), The Engineers
Related Symbols: Roads
Page Number: 52
Explanation and Analysis:

No more new roads in national parks. […] Once people are liberated from the confines of automobiles there will be a greatly increased interest in hiking, exploring, and back-country packtrips.

Related Characters: Edward Abbey (speaker)
Related Symbols: Roads
Page Number: 54
Explanation and Analysis:
Rocks Quotes

There was a bush. A bush growing out of the hard sun-baked mud. And the bush was alive, each of its many branches writhing in a sort of dance and all clothed in a luminous aura of smoky green, fiery blue, flame-like yellow. As he watched the bush become larger, more active, brighter and brighter. Suddenly it exploded into fire.

Related Characters: Edward Abbey (speaker), Billy-Joe Husk, Alfred T. Husk
Page Number: 76
Explanation and Analysis:

The walls of the canyon towered over him, leaning in toward him then moving back, in and then back, but without sound. They were radiant, like heated iron. The moon had passed out of sight. He saw the stars caught in a dense sky like moths in a cobweb, alive, quivering, struggling to escape. He understood their fear, their desperation, and wept in sympathy with their helplessness.

Related Characters: Edward Abbey (speaker), Billy-Joe Husk, Alfred T. Husk
Page Number: 76-77
Explanation and Analysis:
Cowboys and Indians, Part II Quotes

Caught in a no-man’s-land between two worlds the Navajo takes what advantage he can of the white man’s system—the radio, the pickup truck, the welfare—while clinging to the liberty and dignity of his old way of life.

Related Characters: Edward Abbey (speaker)
Related Symbols: Roads
Page Number: 106
Explanation and Analysis:

Surely it is no accident that the most thorough of tyrannies appeared in Europe’s most thoroughly scientific and industrialized nation. If we allow our own country to become as densely populated, overdeveloped and technically unified as modern Germany we may face a similar fate.

Related Characters: Edward Abbey (speaker)
Related Symbols: Roads
Page Number: 130
Explanation and Analysis:

There the dry lake beds between the parallel mountain ranges fill with planes of hot air which reflect sky and mountains in mirror fashion, creating the illusory lakes of blue water, the inverted mountains, the strange vision of men and animals walking through or upon water—Palestinian miracles

Related Characters: Edward Abbey (speaker)
Page Number: 135
Explanation and Analysis:
The Heat of Noon Quotes

A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we many never need to go there. I may never in my life get to Alaska, for example, but I’m grateful that it’s there. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.

Related Characters: Edward Abbey (speaker)
Related Symbols: Roads
Page Number: 129-130
Explanation and Analysis:
The Moon-Eyed Horse Quotes

Once, twice, I thought I heard footsteps following me but when I looked back I saw nothing.

Related Characters: Edward Abbey (speaker), Moon-Eye
Page Number: 150
Explanation and Analysis:
Down the River Quotes

In these hours and days of dual solitude on the river we hope to discover something quite different, to renew our affection for ourselves and the human kind in general by a temporary, legal separation from the mass. […] Cutting the bloody cord, that’s what we feel, the delirious exhilaration of independence, a rebirth backward in time and into primeval liberty, into freedom in the most simple, literal, primitive meaning of the world, the only meaning that really counts. I look at my old comrade Newcomb in a new light and feel a wave of love for him.

Related Characters: Edward Abbey (speaker), Ralph Newcomb
Page Number: 155
Explanation and Analysis:
Havasu Quotes

I slipped by degrees into lunacy, me and the moon, and lost to a certain extent the power to distinguish between what was and what was not myself: looking at my hand I would see a leaf trembling on a branch. A green leaf.

Related Characters: Edward Abbey (speaker)
Page Number: 200
Explanation and Analysis: