78 pages • 2 hours read
Edward AbbeyThe Monkey Wrench Gang
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1975A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Desert
If the gang has a true leader, it might be the desert itself. Its beauty and wildness motivate the gang to take action and take up arms in its defense. Abbey threads the narrative of the gang's exploits with evocative descriptions of the land they love. Abbey describes the "beaded light of afternoon" (58) slanting down canyon walls and "sagebrush and juniper and pinyon pine spread out over a hundred miles of semi-arid plateau" (97). In writing about the operation at Comb Wash, Abbey says the trees fall over, "smashed and bleeding" (79). Abbey remarks that "no one knows precisely how sentient is a pinyon pine" (79). He also personifies the desert, describing mining as shattering "the bone structure of the earth" (79). By using this kind of language, Abbey allows the reader to both visualize and begin to empathize with the plight of the desert landscape.
The Vietnam War
The war in Vietnam haunts Hayduke, a veteran and former POW. He returns to the Southwest, his home, to "ease his vague anger" (17). Hayduke's time in the Green Berets gives him knowledge not only of explosives and firearms but an understanding of men in power. "They're not like us" (96), Hayduke explains to Smith about the developers. He claims that, like the US Army officials, "They'll spend a million dollars to burn one gook to death" (96). Hayduke, likely suffering from PTSD, has acute paranoia about helicopters, which trigger visions of "a dusty road in Cambodia, the bodies of a woman and child fused together in a black burning mass of napalm" (251). Hayduke equates the environmental exploitation, violence and destruction brought on by developers in the Southwest to this kind of destruction and violence he saw while in service. This drives Hayduke to try to end it. During his standoff with police, Hayduke even characterizes himself as "the last VC in the jungle" (401), or "the first" (401), expressing a potential allegiance to the cause of the Vietcong.
Native Americans
In Abbey's rendering of the Southwest, Native Americans most often function as scapegoats for the gang, or punchlines for jokes. They're characterized as shiftless, "nonworking" (166) and motivated only by drink. Doc, when driving through a reservation, asks what they "pay them welfare for" (188). It "rankled" (21) Hayduke to have to spend the night "in the city drunk tank, the one white man in a groaning chorus of sick Navajos" (21). Bonnie says the "utterly ghastly country" (55) of the Navajo reservation is "too good for them" (55)—"them” being Navajos. Additionally, when planning their schemes, the gang decides they'll "blame it on the Indians" (177). Abbey does not give historical context for the abject conditions of many Native Americans on reservations in the Southwest. Nor does he provide a voice representative of the Navajo community. He does, though, sometimes portray Natives in a more realistic light, recognizing that the Navajo Power Plant is "named in honor the Indians whose lungs the plant was treating with sulfur dioxide" (35). Abbey also describes the Navajos as "sold-out, deceived and betrayed" (171) in their dealings with the American government, suggesting that Abbey, for all his xenophobic bluster, may have had a better understanding of the conditions of land appropriation in the Southwest than it seems.
