41 pages • 1 hour read
Edward AbbeyDesert Solitaire
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1968A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “The First Morning”
In the late 1950s, author Edward Abbey takes a position as a seasonal park ranger in Arches National Park, near Moab, Utah. In this first chapter, Abbey offers his first impressions of his new, temporary environs. He describes the area as “a sea of desert” (5) and “the most beautiful place on Earth” (1).
It’s a cold, snowy night when he arrives, after a 450-mile drive, at the mice-ridden “little tin government house trailer” (3) that will serve as his home for the next six months. He wakes in the morning in the pre-sunrise twilight, pulls on his stiff boots and coat, steps outside, and takes in the view. He sees “lavender clouds,” (4) the “dark gorge of the Colorado River,” (5) the “Moab Valley between thousand-foot walls of rock,” (5) the “Roan Cliffs and the Book Cliffs,” (5) as well as the Arches themselves, which he describes as “holes in the rock, windows in stone, no two alike, as varied in form as in dimension […] formed through hundreds of thousands of years by the weathering of the huge sandstone walls” (6).
Abbey states that he has come to this place to confront “the bare bones of existence” (7) and that he dreams of a “hard and brutal mysticism” (7), one in contrast to any sentimental notions of nature. The chapter concludes when he hears the squawking of ravens greeting the dawn and realizes he is “not alone after all” (8).
Chapter 2 Summary: “Solitaire”
At the beginning of this chapter, we meet the park superintendent and the park’s chief ranger, Merle McRae and Floyd Bence, respectively. They show up at noon to bring Abbey some supplies and give him a tour of the park in their pickup truck. On their little tour, the men walk out on some trails, and stop by a spring-fed creek. Abbey sips the water, even though his companions have informed him that it’s not potable. After tasting the water, he reluctantly has to agree with them.
McRae and Bence decline Abbey’s dinner invitation, departing to do other errands after dropping Abbey back at his trailer. Abbey is left alone in a contemplative “great stillness” (13), which includes the sounds of birds and the wind. He describes a feeling of “overwhelming peace. A suspension of time, a continuous present” (13). After consuming his dinner of beans and beer, he builds himself a little fire outside. When the fire dies down, he goes for a walk in the dark, not using his flashlight because “like many other mechanical gadgets [a flashlight] tends to separate a man from the world around him” (15).
Upon returning to the trailer, Abbey decides to write a letter, so he cranks up the gas generator that powers his electric lights. He notes that once his senses are accustomed to the lights and the generator noise, he feels “cut off completely from the world that surrounds the man-made [trailer] shell” (15). He switches off the generator after completing his letter, thus recapturing his earlier feeling of serenity. He writes, "I am twenty miles or more from the nearest fellow human, but instead of loneliness I feel loveliness” (16).
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Serpents of Paradise”
Abbey describes the morning dust storms of April and the sounds of ravens and pinyon jays and doves.
One morning, drinking his coffee on his doorstep, he sees a rattlesnake mere inches from his heels. He doesn’t want to get his gun and kill the creature. Instead, he gingerly maneuvers away and gets a long-handled spade, with which he shepherds the rattler away from the trailer. The following week, the same snake, or a similar one, is back “under the trailer near the kitchen drain, waiting for a mouse” (21). Abbey is now concerned. He considers trapping the mice, which are attracting the rattlers. Instead, he captures a gopher snake, which preys on both mice and rattlesnakes but which do not pose a danger to humans. He takes the gopher snake to live with him in the trailer, to keep both the mice and rattlers at bay. He becomes quite comfortable with the gopher snake, treating it like a pet, picking it up, taking it outside in the sun with him, draping it over his arm or neck, letting it nestle inside his shirt. But after a week or so, the gopher snake, having been turned loose outside, disappears and does not return.
About a month later, the gopher snake returns with a mate. Abbey sees the two “lovers” (23) twining round each other and gets on his hands and knees to come as close to them as possible. Ultimately, they perceive him and race away, “making a soft hissing noise as they slide over the sand and stone” (24). He never sees them again, yet he continues to subtly sense that they are close by, keeping rattlers away and minimizing the number of mice in his home. Abbey “feel[s] their presence watching over [him] like totemic deities” (24).
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Though Abbey evinces admiration for both of the other men who briefly appear in the second chapter, he does not mourn their absence when they go. Rather than loneliness, he experiences “loveliness” (16) once by himself. It seems that isolation from human society may be necessary for him to commune with the wild. Though he is amicable and appreciative of the other men’s talents and stories, he apparently has no need for their company.
Even in these first chapters, we see some small character development in Abbey. In the first chapter, he states, “The personification of the natural is exactly the tendency I wish to suppress in myself, to eliminate for good” (7). He lets the reader know, with this and similar statements, that he is determinedly unsentimental.
Yet, by the end of the third chapter, he acknowledges a sense of “sympathy, mutual aid, symbiosis” (24) with the two gopher snakes and even chides himself, asking, “How can I descend to such anthropomorphism?” (24). He justifies it, however, by insisting that he is “not attributing human motives to [his] snake and bird acquaintances” (24), and that it “seems possible, even probable, that many of the nonhuman undomesticated animals experience emotions unknown to us” (25). Abbey concludes by proclaiming that “all living things on earth are kindred” (25).
An abiding theme is how artifacts of human technology compromise a person’s ability to directly experience the natural world. When he switches on a flashlight at night, Abbey recounts that his “eyes adapt to it and [he] can see only the small pool of light which it makes in front of [him]; [he is] isolated. Leaving the flashlight in [his] pocket where it belongs, [he] remain[s] part of the environment [he] walk[s] through” (15). Similarly, when he fires up the trailer generator, he feels “shut off from the natural world and sealed up, encapsulated, in a box of artificial light and tyrannical noise” (15).
Abbey’s relationships to the animals that share his home and the surrounding environment constitute an important motif. He hears both song and sense in the cries of the birds, and he does not begrudge the mice his stray crumbs but hopes to keep their population within reasonable bounds. He fears but respects the rattlesnakes and prefers not to hurt or kill them, and he conceives a somewhat friendly relationship with a gopher snake. While relationships with other humans could diminish his sense of connection to nature, animals seem to enhance it.
