Abbey, Edward - Paul T. Bryant (essay date February 1991)
Paul T. Bryant (essay date February 1991)
SOURCE: Bryant, Paul T. “Echoes, Allusions, and ‘Reality’ in Hayduke Lives!” Western American Literature 25, no. 4 (February 1991): 311-22.
[In the following essay, Bryant traces Abbey's numerous literary allusions in Hayduke Lives!]
Hayduke Lives!, Edward Abbey's last novel, is an apparently simple but actually complex amalgam of social satire, environmental protest, antic language, ironic ambiguities, and playful fantasy. Outrage is mixed with absurdity; profound archetypes are intertwined with the most trivially comic; idealism and cynicism travel arm in arm; soaring poetic language crashes repeatedly into the rubble of egregious puns; the most absolute conviction in belief and behavior is constantly undermined by the ever-present narrative voice of an authorial figure who may be sympathetic but remains detached, an observer who is always interested, sometimes fascinated,...
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