Northrop Frye writes in Anatomy of Criticism, "Of all fictions, the marvellous journey is the one formula that is never exhausted." I would add that the aimless journey, wandering, is also a timeless formula and one with a relatively constant meaning. This archetypal structure, the journey, variously pervades and controls the novels of Larry McMurtry and extends their import beyond the limits of a regional commentary.

McMurtry's five novels have not generally been considered in relation to archetypes but rather in relation to the more limited patterns afforded by their Texas setting and its distinctive heritage. Regarded in regional terms, the novels show considerable variation, as the impulse to mythicize the forebears and to assess present life by its departure from their model, evident in Horseman, Pass By and Leaving Cheyenne, yields, in The Last Picture Show, to a virtually unrelieved distaste for the moribund small-town life which succeeded that austere heritage and, in the last two novels, to a radical dissociation from any cultural heritage. This growing disaffection is fittingly manifested in the successively greater predominance of journey structures which, increasingly, describe the circuitous patterns of aimless wandering.

In a comment appended to Horseman, Pass By McMurtry said, "In my own generation of adolescents the shakeup [of an urbanizing society] manifested itself as a consuming restlessness—an urge to be on the move."… Leaving Cheyenne shows the strongest attachment to place and to a stable and traditional pattern of life, ranching. To the adolescents of The Last Picture Show and to Hud, of Horseman, Pass By, the automobile offers escape. But to the characters of the two novels of contemporary urban life, Moving On and All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers, neither the goal nor the repellent impulse for escape is clear…. In simple uncertainty, they practically live in their cars. This growth in the dominance of the automobile, as well as the varying modes of the journey motif in the novels and the cultural dissolution they signify, can be seen to occur in three distinct phases, and it is in this sequence that I would like to consider McMurtry's work. In the first two novels, the impulse to journey is chiefly a desire for experience, and the more fully a character identifies himself with the ranching way of life the less he travels. The journeys of The Last Picture Show are sporadic and frustrated expressions of an urge to find an alternative to an empty and deadening life. But the last two novels share a use of journeying as a metaphor for modern life itself, which is seen as being impoverished by the demise of the old traditions and the lack of new structures of meaning and allegiance.

The youthful protagonists of the two early novels, which chronicle the decline of the ranching tradition, keenly feel the urge to be off, to broaden their horizons. To them, journeying means adventure. But both are caught between this urge and the equally strong allegiance to values represented by their ranch homes. Thus, Lonnie, of Horseman, is caught between loving admiration for his grandfather, Homer Bannon, and a reluctant attraction to his stepuncle, Hud…. Lonnie's restlessness manifests itself in his driving fretfully between ranch and town, but there is nothing new he can learn in Thalia and almost nothing to do. It is not that Lonnie is a rebel against his origins; he "really liked" Thalia but "just didn't want it for all the time."… What he does want is acquaintance with the wider world, that essentially represents adulthood.

The catalyst for this wish is Jesse, a forlorn drifter, whose talk makes Lonnie "itch to be off somewhere … to go somewhere past Thalia and Wichita and the oil towns and Sno-Cone stands, into country I'd never seen."… But Jesse explicitly warns him against a rootless life…. [Finally however, with the departure, destruction or death of everything that had meaning to him,] Lonnie sets out, apparently, to follow Jesse's nomadic example.

The implications of this concluding departure, however, are not entirely unambiguous. Certainly he has lost his cultural roots, but it is implied that personal allegiances may nevertheless provide him a secure sense of identity. (pp. 37-40)

A similar theme appears in Leaving Cheyenne as McMurtry moves back to give, from the carefully distinguished points of view of his three central characters, an account of the regional development from the relative stability of the early twentieth century to the town-centered transience of approximately the same period as that of Horseman, Pass By. Against a background of the move away from the land, he projects a drama which affirms allegiance to one's own place. (pp. 40-1)

In the long opening section—which pointedly antedates the local impact of the automobile though not the impulse of youth to venture from home—Gid and Johnny are eager to see new places. Like Lonnie in Horseman, they have an initiation into the "sophisticated" adult world when they take cattle to market in Fort Worth…. But for both—Johnny, who "didn't feel like he belonged to any certain place," and Gid, who "was just tied up with" Archer County …—the venture to the plains is presented so as to debunk the romance of journeying. After Gid's feat of breaking nineteen wild horses in one day come a dull round of work and simple homesickness, and Gid returns home because, he says, "home was where I belonged" and "it was my country and my people."…

After this trip to the plains, both Gid and Johnny stay close to the ranch which Gid has inherited from his father. For Gid, this is largely because he has been bitten by "the land bug."… But Johnny's true "blood's country" or "heart's pastureland" … is cowboying itself, rather than any particular place. He is held to Archer County by love of Gid and Molly. It is largely because of this difference in motivation that Johnny (who appropriately has the last word in the novel) is most nearly the ethical center of the book. (p. 41)

The Last Picture Show is dominated tonally not by nostalgia, but by McMurtry's antipathy to the small town life he describes. Thalia has become a place to be escaped, and restlessness dominates. Sonny, another late-adolescent, who is the nearest in the book to being a central character, first appears in the opening chapter struggling to get his old pickup to run. It is a prophetic detail, for Sonny will never be able to escape. But during the novel he and various other adolescents of Thalia travel [continually] … in their search for amusement. (p. 42)

Their circuitous travels, always ending in Thalia again, are parallel in futility with their ventures into sex. (p. 43)

By the end of the novel, a few have escaped, but Sonny, physically crippled by his past and emotionally dependent on an older woman, is left in dusty Thalia…. Sonny's last act is to start out of town in his truck, but finding nothing but emptiness all around answering the emptiness within, he returns…. (pp. 43-4)

Sonny lacks a past which can provide him an identity and a role in his shabby present. The most visible sign of his regional past in the entire novel is the cattle truck that kills [the retarded boy who was left in his care] Billy. The basis of Sonny's problems, that is, is a radical cultural discontinuity. It is this lack of a meaningful past, present, or future that creates the restlessness increasingly evident in McMurtry's adolescents. (p. 44)

In Moving On and All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers, McMurtry has moved even further from the traditional cultural roots of his region. None of the characters in these two novels has any sense of a usable past, and none is purposefully directed toward the future. They inhabit the burgeoning cities of Texas with no apparent means of orienting themselves and nothing to engage them but endless, unsatisfying motion—as the title Moving On well indicates. The problem, of course, is that they are not moving on toward anything. The journey pattern so insistent in McMurtry's first three novels has in these become dominant, as the characters drive endlessly and pointlessly around the country chiefly between Texas and California. Not surprisingly, novels so constituted lack cohesive form; or rather, their forms may be described as being imitative to a radical and destructive degree.

The primary action of both novels is completely divorced from ranching, the traditional, land-based way of life that provides a relatively stable background for the first two novels. In Moving On, ranching is transformed into rodeoing, itself a transient way of life. Real ranching appears only in the small spread of a stepuncle of the heroine Patsy's husband and in a vast domain, like an industrial complex, whose owner shares, in a scarcely lesser degree, the wanderlust of the main characters. Only Roger Waggoner, the elderly stepuncle, never travels. Waggoner is an embodiment of lost but still respected virtues; a parallel figure in All My Friends, the narrator's Uncle L, is a ludicrous eccentric running an insane parody of a ranch. But either way, both are vestiges of the past, unable to hand on its values. (pp. 44-5)

Aside from these ranching relies, the two novels are populated by nomads. In both, university life is a way-station for academic migrants and those who have not yet decided where they want to go. Both casts of characters are quite large, since people drift into and out of the main characters' lives, seemingly for no particular reason, as they wander…. They are as fully cut off from the moral past as they are from the ranching past. Action develops as encounter, involvement (often sexual), and estrangement. Danny Deck, narrator and hero of All My Friends, is hopelessly subject to random emotional entanglements, all of which prove destructive as well as transient, because he has no basis for judging others or the quality of his own response to them. Like the journey structure of which it is a function, this pattern of emotion-laden encounter that litters the novel with undeveloped characters can be seen as a functional form clearly and poignantly indicative of the protagonist's cultural malaise. He feels, he says, "dislodged,"… and stability in his personal relationships is as impossible as fixity in place. (p. 45)

None of the characters in either novel travels with fixed purpose—their wanderings are not quests—nor is even the motive of escape clearly defined. Rather, like Patsy's husband Jim, they travel out of vague dissatisfaction with life as they find it and uncertainty as to what they want to do. (p. 46)

Similarly, McMurtry's construction of novels by no apparent principle but random accretion appears to be a self-defeating enterprise. The pattern of transient involvement in both these late novels is brilliantly indicative of the cultural shortcoming McMurtry indicts …; unfortunately, this expressive form, by its very nature, is destructive of the overall novelistic structure and renders the work a chronicle of tedium. One thinks, by contrast, of the tight structures of Horseman, Pass By and Leaving Cheyenne. McMurtry seems to be saying that their kind of neatness is available only to an art of nostalgia, that an art honestly treating the present flux, at least as he experienced it in Texas, is foreordained to fragmentation. If so, he is offering a bleak aesthetic vision.

The ending of All My Friends is problematic but clearly related to McMurtry's use of journeying as a metaphor for cultural loss. The puzzle is that Danny apparently drowns himself in the Rio Grande, but his death would violate all conventions of first person, past tense, narration. (p. 47)

The sense of finality, hence of death, is accented by the preceding abandonment of his car, which itself seems near death…. The implication is that by giving up his means of journeying, Danny is giving up living.

The quality of Danny Deck's journeying, as of Patsy's and the journeying of numerous minor characters in the earlier novels, has been circuitous wandering. In Leaving Cheyenne, Gid and Johnny travel only to learn the lessons proper to youth; they have a source that draws them back and a feeling of belonging when they get there. In The Last Picture Show only Sam the Lion knows his place and keeps it. In the last two novels figures out of the Texas past who bear marginal resemblance to Sam, the old ranchers, are anachronisms. The young central characters of all five novels have either loose ancestral ties or none at all, as fathers or father surrogates die partway through the action of all except the last novel. Lacking any sense of continuity with the past or of belonging to the life of any particular place, McMurtry's protagonists are, to a progressively greater degree after Leaving Cheyenne, left to wander inconclusively. (p. 48)

[McMurtry's] choice of allusive and thematic patterns extends the significance of his work beyond the scope of documentary or localized satiric interest. The initiation patterns of his novels, for instance, are universalizing, as are the literary allusions which link the personal emotions revealed in Leaving Cheyenne to those of people far removed in time and place. In that same novel, the structural indications of a cyclical vision of human life also extend the reverberation of the drama beyond its indisputably pungent localization.

McMurtry's recourse to the archetype of journeying is another, and a more significant, resonating device. As we have seen, the journeying impulse is closely related to the specific cultural impoverishment McMurtry exposes. But through the journey pattern these novels join a longtime tradition of literary journeys, a tradition which has appeared in epics of all literatures but has been a particularly characteristic American form because of the peculiarities of the nation's history. Indeed, the insistence with which McMurtry's characters strike out … links these novels to the heritage of westering and to the great California dream. Like other Americans throughout our history, these Texans define their values spatially. The loss of traditional values involves his fictional people in fruitless geographical search and a permanent restlessness. (pp. 49-50)

Janis P. Stout, "Journeying As a Metaphor for Cultural Loss in the Novels of Larry McMurtry," in Western American Literature (copyright, 1976, by the Western Literature Association), Vol. XI, No. 1, Spring, 1976, pp. 37-50.