Western Nature In Literature Essays - Willa Cather,

Western Nature In Literature Nature is a major theme throughout all of the stories we have read so far this semester, weighing in heavily in the subject matter of each novel. Despite this common thread, nature is handled quite differently in each story, with obvious varied effects in the story. Willa Cather uses the nature of the southwest as an overwhelming presence that stuns any who approach it, while John Steinbeck uses nature with his characters as one would use water with a goldfish in his bowl. Norman Maclean creates nature as a religious experience, and most interestingly, Wallace Stegner uses nature least of all, yet uses the few scenes of nature he provides to jar and jab the plot into advancing. Each of these portrayals of nature is radically different, but each allows the reader a closer glimpse into the natural world of the west. Examples of the overwhelming and awesome power of nature are abundant in Willa Cather's Death Comes For The Archbishop. There are so many of them that one can virtually flip open to any page in the novel to find an example of the sense of nature's awesome power, but some are more amazing than others. Father Latour lay with his ear to this crack for a long while, despite the cold that arose from it. He told himself he was listening to one of the oldest voices of the earth. What he heard was the sound of a great underground river, flowing through a resounding cavern. The water was far, far below, perhaps as deep as the foot of the mountain, a flood moving in utter blackness under the ribs of antediluvian rock. It was not a rushing noise, but the sound of a great flood moving with majesty and power. (Cather 129-130) Other examples in Cather's writing are not so dramatic, but they highlight the ever-present beauty of nature in the southwest. The water thus diverted was but a tiny thread of the full creek; the main stream ran down the arroyo over a white rock bottom, with green willows and deep hay grass and brilliant wild flowers on its banks. Evening primroses, the fireweed, and butterfly weed grew to a tropical size and brilliance there among the sedges. (Cather 165) While Cather blatantly overwhelmed her characters with the beauty of nature surrounding them, Steinbeck immersed his characters so deeply in their surroundings it seemed as if they were unaware of them, just as we are unaware of the oxygen we breathe or the way our heart is constantly beating. The one part of nature that is most often referred to is the forest surrounding Tortilla Flat, and even then only sparingly, and in a way that often downplays its existence, just the way we downplay things that seem common and unusual to us. On the second page of the story, where Steinbeck says the ?forest and town intermingle? he is making the forest seem more common, just another place for the adventures of Danny and his compatriots to occur. Sentences that could carry more weight in other narratives are simplified in this story, to the point where they are stated as simple facts, as opposed to the poetic lines that they could have been written as. ?The sun was warming the beach now.? (Steinbeck 91) This sentence could have easily been developed into an entire paragraph about how the light of the sun reflected back from the froth of the waves and the sparkle of the sand, and so forth and so on. However, Steinbeck boils down the background to simple facts, making it easier to focus on the characters of Danny and his unorthodox Knights of the Round Table. In A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean may have attempted to boil all of the details away from the story to simplify it, but in doing so he highlighted certain parts of nature in such great detail that he helped exemplify the first sentence of the story. ?In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.? This is where Maclean provides the first glimpse into nature as a religious experience. Cather made nature overwhelming, but Maclean makes nature become an extension of religion.