[In the following excerpt from his short study of Brautigan, Boyer discusses the ways in which Trout Fishing in America is an attempt to transcend reality through the use of the imagination.]

Rendering experience in self-contained little sections, and relying upon the cumulative power of these sections for dramatic effect, would be a technique Brautigan would become identified with, but one he used to greatest advantage in his first novel, Trout Fishing in America. Like his stories and poems, each of these sections relies upon voice and tone and the appeal of the speaker for its charm. And there's often a “serial” quality to be found here as well. The degree to which we can appreciate what's going on has to do with how willing we are to allow the speaker his unique path of logic. For instance, “Knock On Wood (Part One),” the second section of the fifty that make up the novel, begins in this way.

As a child when did I first hear about trout fishing in America? From whom? I guess it was a stepfather of mine.

Summer of 1942.

The old drunk told me about trout fishing. When he could talk, he had a way of describing trout as if they were a precious and intelligent metal.

Silver is not a good adjective to describe what I felt when he told me about trout fishing.

I'd like to get it right.

Maybe trout steel. Steel made from trout. The clear snow-filled river acting as foundry and heat.

Imagine Pittsburgh.

A steel that comes from trout, used to make buildings, trains and tunnels.

The Andrew Carnegie of Trout!

(Trout [Trout Fishing in America] 3)

There is a sense throughout the novel of a mind-in-progress, a mind that would like to, as the speaker says here, get it right, and too a reminder that no matter how casual and familiar the writing may seem, communicating with people is no simple matter. The world is always elusive—When did I first hear about it? From whom?—and accounting for it is always a tentative business, as in the speaker's caveat above, I guess it was. Then too, what's real often has little to do with what's actual. The time and place (recalled here only in the broadest terms, Summer of 1942), as well as the people involved (a stepfather, apparently one among several, one described here no more completely than the old drunk), are of less importance than what the mind of the speaker can do with the material.

The last line of this section, The Andrew Carnegie of Trout!, is meaningless in and of itself; but that's not true once we're aware of the process of the mind which works its way toward this conclusion. Trout, to the speaker's stepfather, are currency, of value only in terms of what they can buy. But that bit of profanity can be reworked until it takes on almost magical qualities. A precious metal leads the speaker to think in terms of silver, to reject silver as the word he would choose, to move from silver to steel, from steel to the city that boasts of itself as the steel center of the world, to move from the industrial wastelands of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to the making of a civilized America, and from that to Pittsburgh's Andrew Carnegie—acquisition personified.

None of this imaginative word association dilutes the fact that the speaker's stepfather was “an old drunk,” nor that his notion of trout is ill-conceived and distasteful; nor does it deny that Andrew Carnegie may have been one of the great robber barons of his time. What it does instead is to suggest a thaumatropic and idyllic vision which can emerge when the mind is given a chance, an ordering—or perhaps re-ordering—of the cold hard facts, when cold hard facts are understood to be of less importance than the person who would wrestle with them.

Trout Fishing in America, Brautigan said, was “a vision of America,” and that seems to be as good a way of putting it as any, for he was holding out the possibility of transcending the world before us. Transcending the day-to-day realities of modern life through the use of imagination seems to be the structuring principle of the novel, in fact. As the novel gradually develops through its individual passages, simple comparisons seem to become metaphors, and these metaphors finally take on a life of their own. As many critics have noted, it's as if the speaker's imagination becomes more powerful and more transcendent as the novel progresses.

But it's a mistake to become too trusting of the speaker's gentle voice and manner and his pastoral vision in general. Let's look at two of the most often quoted—and most often compared—sections of the novel, the first, “Knock On Wood (Part Two),” an early one, and the other, “The Cleveland Wrecking Yard,” from among the final sections.

One spring afternoon as a child in the strange town of Portland, I walked down to a different street corner, and saw a row of old houses, huddled together like seals on a rock.

Then there was a long field that came sloping down off a hill. The field was covered with green grass and bushes. On top of the hill there was a grove of tall, dark trees. At a distance I saw a waterfall come pouring down off the hill. It was long and white and I could almost feel its cold spray.

There must be a creek there, I thought, and it probably has trout in it.

Trout.

At last an opportunity to go trout fishing, to catch my first trout, to behold Pittsburgh.

It was growing dark. I didn't have time to go and look at the creek. I walked home past the glass whiskers of the houses, reflecting the downward rushing waterfalls of night.

(4)

But when he returned to fish the trout stream, equipped with fish hook made from a bent nail and white bread from which to make dough balls for bait, the stream was not the same.

But as I got closer to the creek I could see that something was wrong. The creek did not act right. There was a strangeness to it. There was a thing about its motion that was wrong. Finally I got close enough to see what the trouble was.

The waterfall was just a flight of white wooden stairs leading up to a house in the trees.

I stood there for a long time, looking up and looking down, following the stairs with my eyes, having trouble believing.

Then I knocked on my creek and heard the sound of wood.

I ended up by being my own trout and eating the slice of bread myself.

(5)

In the later passage, “The Cleveland Wrecking Yard,” the speaker goes to a junkyard and discovers that a trout stream—with insects and animals and foliage available at an extra charge—is being sold off as scrap. The similarities between the two passages are obvious. In both we're dealing with a trout stream situated in a city, in both we're dealing with streams which do not physically exist, and in both the climax of the scene takes place when the speaker puts his hand to the stream and tests it against his own existence. But the climaxes are also distinctly different—as the lines from the end of “The Cleveland Wrecking Yard” clearly witness.

O I had never in my life seen anything like that trout stream. It was stacked in piles of various lengths: ten, fifteen, twenty feet, etc. There was one pile of hundred foot lengths … I went up close and looked at the lengths of stream. I could see some trout in them … It looked like a fine stream. I put my hand in the water. It was cold and felt good.

(Trout 106-07)

The central difference here has to do with the way the speaker's vision functions. In the earlier section, the vision of the child transcends the world before him, if only for a few hours, as a stairway becomes what he would wish it to be, a trout stream, one in which he can catch the trout that his father has told him about earlier. This is a child's magic, pure Piaget. But it's not any more than that. The powers of the child's imagination transport him temporarily beyond the limits of Portland and his blue-collar life—that's all. Finally that magical thought is testable against a world of very real dimensions: touch the stream and it turns back into stairs; hear your mother call, and it's time to go home.

That isn't true in the second passage. Here the speaker's vision doesn't just transcend reality. What begins as one more playful examination of the potential of America (trout fishing in America) being tested against its modern condition (a wrecking yard) assumes literal—and troubling—dimensions: conjure a trout stream in your mind, and there will be water that's cold to the touch.

Rather than reality determining the metaphor, then, here the metaphor determines the speaker's reality. And what we seem to be witnessing may well be less significant as a demonstration of the powers of the imagination, albeit they're impressive throughout the novel, than it is as a warning that the speaker is in danger of losing touch, both literally and figuratively, with the world all around him.