[In the following essay, Walker offers a Sartrean analysis of the story “Great Falls” and the novel Wildlife.]

Several of Richard Ford's works are classic coming-of-age tales in which a teenage boy must witness a parental failure, experience sexual desire and disappointment, pose questions that have no obvious answers, and, like William Faulkner's Sarty or the narrator of James Joyce's “Araby,” choose justice over kin or feel his eyes burn with anguish and shame. Ford's male narrators in the short story “Great Falls” (included in Rock Springs [1987]) and the novel Wildlife (1990) experience loneliness that accompanies self-knowledge gained despite, or perhaps because of, the inscrutableness of others. Although Ford leaves his narrators in isolation at each narrative's end, he reveals the heightened awareness that has projected them into the act of observation. Told in the past tense, each text is narrated by an adult speaker who structures his story carefully, editorializing and revising the incidents that changed the course of his teenage years and shaped his attitudes toward others. Significantly, this mature perspective confirms each speaker's ability to recast an emotionally volatile time as an open-ended story.

Through the scaffolding of each narrator's quest to know himself and his parents, Ford bolsters what on the surface are spare narratives with an underlying philosophical complexity, and his propensity to quote Jean-Paul Sartre outside of the frame of his fictional universes suggests the author's fascination with being, knowing, and nothingness, words that also occur frequently in Ford's fiction. His narrators pose epistemological and existential questions that defy easy answers, finally discovering not only the frailty of human nature but also the frailty of language. Paradoxically, language's instability also provides its magic, its capacity to transform and transcend the ordinary. Ford's narrators in both “Great Falls” and Wildlife, in fact, embark upon quests not unlike that of Sartre's own fictional and epistemological seeker, Roquentin, the narrator of Nausea who discovers that only art may transform loneliness and transcend existence and time.¹

Resisting notions that his often-musing narrators liken his fiction to Walker Percy's or other southern works dominated by intellectual male voices, as noted critic Fred Hobson has observed (Hobson [1991] 41ff),² Ford prefers to situate his work in the context of a Western literary canon that can lay claim to writers and texts far exceeding the geographical boundaries of the South.³ To limit certain kinds of characters by a regional frame is to ignore a much vaster sphere of influence, Ford argues. Rather than grouping Faulkner's Quentin Compson, Wolfe's Eugene Gant, Warren's Jack Burden, Percy's Will Barrett and his own Frank Bascombe as “southern male intellectuals” whose thoughts stultify their actions, Ford observes that southerners have no such corner on this market (Walker 133). Ford is much more apt to quote Sartre than Faulkner, as he does in an interview: “To name something is to take it out of the well of the unmediated and bring it up to the level of notice” (Walker 132). It is in this context that his narrators' choices to tell their stories in “Great Falls” and Wildlife become significant.

Both narratives depend upon a voice that interrupts time, gliding past the intervening years and back to a season, a day, or even an hour when life as the narrator knew it changed. The texts are in fact quite similar in tone and exposition, and each narrator's self-conscious phrasing indicates his deliberate plan to tell these events as crafted story rather than angst-filled confession. “Great Falls” opens with Jackie's words: “This is not a happy story. I warn you. My father was a man named Jack Russell, and when I was a young boy in my early teens, we lived with my mother in a house to the east of Great Falls, Montana …” (“Great Falls” 29). The turning point for Jackie takes place in 1960, when he is fourteen. Joe, Wildlife's narrator, begins, “In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him” (Wildlife 1). Each narrator locates the memory by place and time and his own age, the past tense removing him from the scene even as he participates as central character.

Furthermore, each son sets the mother at some emotional (or physical) distance from himself and his father, either through the judicious use of “we” or simply by yoking himself with his father: “when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working,” for example. The past tense also hints that this connection between father and son is a temporary link, one determined not so much by kinship as by sheer circumstance: time, place, and action. These syntactical details suggest the rifts that will only widen between the speaker and his parents, so that, by each narrative's end, the “I” has become unquestionably singular.

The disappearing mother further connects these narratives thematically. Both sons witness marital disjunction, usually initiated as an easing of communication between father and mother that develops into a full-blown and profound rupture, often precipitated by the mother's pursuit of another man and followed by her departure. Interestingly, several other of Ford's stories include sons with absent mothers or mothers who have taken up with boyfriends, such as “Children,” “Optimists,” and “Communist,” all published along with “Great Falls” in Rock Springs, as well as the more recent “Jealous,” published in the collection Women with Men (1997). This recurrence of fictional circumstance would seem to suggest the author's fascination with familial dissolution, or, perhaps, echoing a metaphysical poetic lesson, the predictability of woman's inconstancy. Some readers might seek to identify the death of Ford's own father in 1960, when the younger Ford was sixteen, as some psychological impetus for exploring themes of abandonment. Ford's own life, however, testifies to his mother's consistent presence in it, as the author himself documents in “My Mother, in Memory” (Harper's 44-57). Ford himself has been married to the same woman for thirty years. These facts may undercut attempts to psychoanalyze the author as well as refute unjust charges of sexism on Ford's part. Careful readings of these narratives would also preclude the latter, since the father characters emerge as self-absorbed and somewhat oblivious to the marital problems that precede their wives' departures while their subsequent behavior is revealed as immature at best.

What seems most significant is that in each narrative the sons must deal with both parents as frail human beings rather than authority figures possessed of prudence and wisdom. The parents tumble off their pedestals; the sons meanwhile clamber for some purchase on adult ground precisely as that territory becomes defined as mysterious, unpredictable, unreliable. In these works, parents become demythologized when their sons are hardly pubescent (not in itself an uncommon occurrence), and the role reversals that ensue determine each narrator's perspective thereafter. The collapse of parental structure, these texts suggest, is not a phenomenon that necessitates explication; in fact, such circumstances will resist rather than yield to studies thereof. That resistance is what captivates each son. Literally being the only one left out of and with no control over the father-mother relationship, even as he exists as one point of the triangle connecting them, the narrator drifts into his role as outsider before the reader's very eyes. Simultaneously, his parents become ghostlier demarcations of their former selves, now suddenly unknowable. The question that inhabits each narrative is an epistemological one: What can I know when I cannot even know my parents?

“Great Falls” succinctly poses this question. Early paragraphs in the story indicate that Jack and his wife, who is never given a first name at all and in fact is called “Mrs. Russell” only once over the story's course, have long had different ideas about how their lives would proceed. “[My father] had been an air force sergeant and had taken his discharge in Great Falls. And instead of going home to Tacoma, where my mother wanted to go, he had taken a civilian's job with the Air Force, working on planes, which was what he liked to do” (29-30). Jackie's mother married Jack because he was “young and wonderful looking” (30), and because she wanted to escape her present life and see the world, which Jackie assumes they were able to do for a while. “That was the life she wanted, even before she knew much about wanting anything else or about the future” (30). Acknowledging his mother's thwarted or buried desires, Jackie intimates that his mother possessed some internal life that even she was not yet privy to at that age. That internal space seems to grow larger and larger, so that by the time he tells the story, his mother is someone with whom he and his father “lived” (29), almost a stranger.

Jackie more explicitly characterizes his father's passions: hunting and fishing. In so doing, he subtly reveals his father's faults: “It is a true thing that my father did not know limits. … [H]e would catch a hundred fish in a weekend, and sometimes more than that. It was all he did from morning until night, and it was never hard for him. … It was the same with ducks, the other thing he liked” (30-31). Jackie describes taking these trips with his father and later selling—illegally, of course—the excesses of wild game that he has caught to the Great Northern Hotel. Afterwards, often they would stop for Jack to get a drink, arriving home late. Jackie never wonders what his mother is doing during these weekends or attempts to assess her degree of loneliness. Jack senior emerges as a man who does what he wants, when he wants, and who disregards the rules if they don't suit him. Such descriptions suggest some insensitivity to his wife's needs and desires as well as a nature that defies any external boundaries that don't coincide with his own. Jack is a man of excesses whose passions apparently exclude his wife, at least most of the time.

One night, however, after one of these hunting trips, Jackie and his father depart from routine, a change that instigates an unusual conversation between father and son as well as foreshadows the incident that alters the family dynamic. Jack suggests that they go straight home from the Great Northern and “surprise your mother” (33), cook the remaining ducks on the grill, do “something different” (33). On the way home, Jack adopts a different manner with his son, telling him things that Jackie finds a little odd, such as that his mother had said, “‘Nobody dies of a broken heart’” (33), and asking him questions about himself. “‘What do you worry about, Jackie,’ my father said” (34). Pushing his son for an answer, he suggests a few himself: girls, his future sex life, all of which Jackie denies. “‘Well, what then?’ my father said. ‘What else is there?’ ‘I worry if you're going to die before I do,’ I said, though I hated saying that, ‘or if Mother is. That worries me’” (34). Although his father makes a joke out of his response (“‘If I were you, I'd worry that we might not’” [34]), Jackie describes the conversation poignantly: “He smiled at me, and it was not the worried, nervous smile from before, but a smile that meant he was pleased. And I don't remember him ever smiling at me that way again” (34). From his future vantage point, the narrator can cast these moments as fleeting and significant, his younger self as poised unwittingly on the brink of change. He tells the reader that his father then says, “‘I want to respect your privacy’ … for no reason at all that I understood” (35). The exchange dramatizes Jackie's awareness of his parents' mortality, foreshadows broken hearts and his father's own inscrutable behavior (his sentence uttered “for no reason at all that I understood”), as well as the son's inability to imagine a reason that makes sense at the time. Only in retrospect can this editorializing occur (“And I don't remember him ever smiling at me that way again,” for instance), suggesting the narrator's careful reconstruction of the scene and the dialogue.

Meanwhile, the circumstances, departing from the usual routine, surprising the mother, set up the story. The mother will not be expecting them. Father and son will arrive home to find a strange car parked down the road from their house and a young man—not much older than Jackie—in the kitchen. Several confrontations and conversations ensue. The young man, whose name is Woody, and Jackie wait outside while his father and mother talk. When his father comes out of the house, he “looked roughed up, as though he had hurt himself somehow” (39), and soon he pulls a gun from his pocket that he brandishes foolishly in Woody's face, repeatedly asking him, “‘What is the matter with you?’” (40). All four characters end up in the yard, publicly displayed. Jackie observes that no one really thought that his father would shoot Woody, except perhaps his father himself, who “was trying to find out how to” (41). With his mother standing by ineffectually, trying to assure Jack that Woody doesn't love her, Woody unflinching and nonchalant before the father's gesticulations and rapid-fire questions, and Jackie standing by as a spectator, the tableau depicts failed communication on several fronts. Jackie's preoccupation with knowing others has begun as he tries to make sense of the scene.

The verb “to know” dominates many of Jackie's sentences. Woody “knew nothing about what was here” (italics mine) (38). While talking to Woody, Jackie finds himself wondering “what Woody knew that I didn't. Not about my mother—I didn't know anything about that and didn't want to—but about a lot of things, about the life out in the dark, about coming out here, about airports, even about me. He and I were not so far apart in age, I knew that. But Woody was one thing, and I was another” (italics mine) (39). Jackie appears certain of what he does know, and he knows enough to realize just how much is left unknown. Talking to Woody in the yard will not reveal Woody's secrets, or explain “life out in the dark.” But Jackie wonders what Woody knows about him, as if now he has to see himself—and indeed the entire realm of his family life—through someone else's eyes. The retrospective narrative voice transforms the teenage Jackie's encounter with Woody into a fundamentally existential moment; Jackie knows he exists and that Woody exists, but he cannot make the common fact of existence pull them into each other's sphere of knowing. In other words, the presence of an “other,” while confirming one's own being in the world, does nothing to dissipate isolation. In this encounter, l'enfer c'est autrui, as Sartre has written, because Woody's gaze does nothing but alienate Jackie from himself and what he has previously assumed about his world. Jackie's last sentence—“Woody was one thing, and I was another”—asserts the basic separateness that characterizes all human beings, the very notion dramatized moments later by the scene in the yard.

Furthermore, all of the words exchanged in that scene become emptied of meaning. Jack's threats, Woody's response, and Jackie's mother's denial of Woody's love finally effect nothing.

“Are you in love with her, too? Are you, crazy man? Are you? Do you say you love her? Say you love her! Say you love her so I can blow your fucking brains in the sky.”

“All right,” Woody said. “No. It's all right.”

“He doesn't love me, Jack. For God's sake,” my mother said. She seemed so calm.

(41)

Woody's contradictory and passive response to his father, his mother's unemotional resignation and imminent departure with Woody, and his father's hollow gesture of violence all conspire, presenting these adults as isolated individuals doomed to utter meaningless phrases. Hell is other people, this passage implies, especially when the one supreme isolation-defying instrument, the very thing that sets human beings apart from all other creatures—language—fails.

When language fails, Jackie can only know the circumstances empirically, through hearing and watching, paying attention to the signs that make this place familiar to him: “The wind rose then, and from behind the house I could hear [the dog] bark once from far away, and I could smell the irrigation ditch, hear it hiss in the field. … It was nothing Woody knew about, nothing he could hear or smell” (38). Though present in the same surroundings, Jackie and Woody exist in different worlds of knowing. What is “nothing” for Woody assumes significance for Jackie, further assuring each's alienation from the other. Jackie knows these things because, for him, these sensations actually signify something, that is, that this place is his home; for Woody, the same events fail to register, and certainly fail to signify. However, even for Jackie, his awareness of his own being in the world, what the philosopher Martin Heidegger would call Dasein, will not be enough. Jackie cannot know others through the signs of the wind blowing, the dog barking, the water hissing; rather he must rely on words, symbols, the very things that his parents and Woody cannot summon effectively.

Woody even lies inexplicably to Jackie, telling him that his mother has been married before. Later, when Jackie asks her if this is true, she says, “‘No. … Who told you that? That isn't true. I never was. Did Jack say that to you? Did your father say that?’” (47). Jackie never tells her who has made this statement, and his mother's surprisingly defensive response suggests some past of which his father has not approved, but Jackie will never, of course, know the real truth. Likewise, his mother will never know who spoke those words.

Under these circumstances, language is a slippery instrument. In its purest use, language may function semiotically as a symbol connecting an object with a word and, via the word, the person with the object, just as the word “wind” denotes that which is blowing, that Jackie hears and recognizes as “wind,” and also connotes other meanings, associations of familiarity, security, knowledge of a place. Drawing upon the writings of American philosopher Charles Peirce, Walker Percy has distilled this semiotic concept into a simple triangular diagram; the speaking person, the word, and the thing the word signifies each make up one point of the figure (Percy, “The Delta Factor” [1984] 40). The picture becomes somewhat more complicated when another person is introduced into the exchange; then the word must signify the same thing to both speakers in order for communication to occur. If words lose their meanings or fail to signify, as they have in the conversation that takes place out in the yard in “Great Falls,” then language, Jackie discovers, may not be an effective conduit for knowledge.

As the story ends, Jackie continues to frame the memory in terms of some epistemological search; he says that he thought to himself, “my life had turned suddenly, and … I might not know exactly how or which way for possibly a long time. Maybe, in fact, I might never know” (49). He goes on to question,

why wouldn't my father let my mother come back? Why would Woody stand in the cold with me outside my house and risk being killed? Why would he say my mother had been married before, if she hadn't been? And my mother herself—why would she do what she did? In five years my father had gone off to Ely, Nevada, to ride out the oil strike there, and been killed by accident. And in the years since then I have seen my mother from time to time—in one place or another, with one man or other—and I can say, at least, that we know each other. But I have never known the answers to these questions, have never asked anyone their answers.

(49)

The adult voice wrestles with the same questions, this passage attests. Despite claiming to know his mother (perhaps meaning here that they are at least acquainted), Jackie suggests that he does not feel comfortable enough with her to talk about these puzzling events. As he has observed about Woody, he “was one thing, and I was another” (39). The story's closing passage only confirms this observation: “Though possibly it—the answer—is simple: it is just low-life, some coldness in us all, some helplessness that causes us to misunderstand life when it is pure and plain, makes our existence seem like a border between two nothings, and makes us no more or less than animals who meet on the road—watchful, unforgiving, without patience or desire” (49). A “coldness,” a “helplessness,” keeps one person distinct from another, so that two lives cannot really meet, so that “our existence [is] a border between two nothings” (49). In this passage, the speaker synthesizes his epistemological and existential inquiries: we can never know each other, he claims, and, furthermore, we exist in the face of nothingness; others may remind us not only of our being but also of our isolation, our existence in the face of what is not, and of our own consciousness that is impossible to explain. Whatever it is that makes us misunderstand each other, the “coldness,” the “helplessness,” and whenever language fails us, we are no more (or less) than animals, the speaker finally theorizes.

These are the philosophical conclusions that the narrator of “Great Falls” draws, sounding finally much more like Jean-Paul Sartre than a product of Montana.⁴ Thematically such a detail is appropriate; the narrator may take the reader by surprise with his existential thoughts. His observation about the human predicament may seem a bleak and unpredictable one, but he has warned the reader from the beginning that this will not be a happy story. Despite such a grim analysis, the narrator's own attempt to make the circumstances yield to language is important, and his Sartrean preoccupation with being and nothingness no accident on Richard Ford's part.

Ford makes the same point in his novel Wildlife, which chronicles another narrator's witnessing of familial dissolution: his mother leaving his father for another man, his father's outraged act of arson as a consequence, and then the strange reconciliation between his parents. Also set in Great Falls, the narrative centers around Joe's attempt to know his parents. Like Jackie, he embarks upon an epistemological search, though he acknowledges early in his telling that “[w]hen you are sixteen you do not know what your parents know, or much of what they understand, and less of what's in their hearts” (18). Again, however, Ford provides an adult narrator, one who looks back over his life and relates the details in a certain way. Such a perspective makes the father's words to his son—“When you get older. … If you want to know the truth don't listen to what people tell you” (15)—particularly resonant. Language will fail here, too, and here, too, the son will fail to know his parents.

Wildlife, in fact, seems to be an extended exploration of the themes first dramatized in “Great Falls.” Just as Jackie suspects that his mother has not been happy with his father's decisions, so Joe speculates about his mother's unfulfilled desires. In Wildlife, the Brinsons have moved to Montana because Joe's father, Jerry, had hoped to partake in the area's economic boom. Jerry has been a golf pro, working at small country clubs mainly in eastern Washington State, though the family has lived in Idaho preceding their move to Montana. Joe thinks perhaps his mother has followed his father simply out of love, but says, “I do not think she ever wanted to come to Montana” (4), where the weather was harsher and the people less friendly. Joe presents his family as outsiders in the town, a fact only exacerbated after his father loses his job at the club and his mother takes a position as a swim instructor at the YWCA. Meanwhile, timber fires rage west of Great Falls, figuratively suggesting the tension smoldering in Joe's own family as his father goes weeks without seeming to look for work. At last a position fighting the fires opens, a chance Jerry enthusiastically takes, despite his wife Jean's vocal opposition of her worries that he knows nothing about fighting fires. Thus Jerry leaves Joe alone with his mother, whose behavior will become increasingly erratic. Almost overnight, in the three days of his father's absence, Joe's assumptions about his family will be questioned; the adult narrator observes: “It should've been a time when I cared about more things—a new girlfriend, or books. … But I only cared about my mother and my father then” (25). The “then” punctuates the narrator's perspective, implying that since that time he has learned something about himself and his parents and the boundaries between them.

In her husband's absence, Jean takes up with another man, Warren Miller, who has played golf at the club, entering a dalliance that will set Joe apart from his mother and cause him to see her differently. Seemingly oblivious to her son's feelings, Jean flaunts this relationship, taking Joe with her to Warren's house where she dances drunkenly with him and kisses him. Even after she and Joe go to the car, she returns to Warren's house one last time, leaving Joe cold and watchful in the car, where through the window he can see that “Warren Miller had pulled my mother's green dress up from behind her so that you could see where her stockings were held by white elastic straps, and you could see her white underpants. … [H]e was holding my mother outside her underwear and pulling her toward him so hard that he picked her up off the floor and held her against him while he kissed her and she kissed him” (97). Forced into voyeurism, Joe sees his mother as he never should see her: a sexual object whose garters he cannot even call by name, resorting instead to the innocent and descriptive “white elastic straps.” Later that same evening, his mother has sex with Warren Miller in her own home, where Joe will see Warren naked in the hall. Again Jean will leave Joe alone while she walks Warren out to his car in the morning's wee hours. Joe waits, again looking out the window, forced to watch for something as yet unknown, identifying with a magpie that he catches in the dim light of his flashlight through the window.

Contemplation of this object makes Joe himself like the bird. The bird seemed to be looking at “nothing” (111), and “It wasn't afraid simply because it knew nothing to be afraid of” (112). When it finally flies at the glass, Joe fears that it will crash against the window, but strangely it veers without hitting anything, “leaving me there with my heart pounding and my light shining onto the cold yard at nothing” (112). Confronted with “nothing,” Joe likewise becomes invisible, literally and figuratively speaking, as the bird regards the nothingness where he is, glassed in by his own isolation. The repetition of “nothing” recalls the ending of “Great Falls,” and Joe's moment in the dark with the bird may be likened to the strange exchange between Jackie and Woody in that story. Only here it is the bird's gaze, not Woody's, that renders the boy aware of what he does not know and of the emptiness that surrounds him and fills him. At first even his mother does not see him when she returns to the house, but, finally catching a glimpse of him in the shadows, she slaps him inexplicably, not once but twice, with each hand. Again he catches sight of her in a way that makes her strange to him, her stomach “and all of that” (114) visible through her open bathrobe. He wishes that “she had her clothes on” (114).

Both Joe and his mother are objectified here; the son can only see his mother as the consummate “other,” but her confrontation of him makes him see himself through her eyes to such an extent that he actually apologizes to her, ashamed of having witnessed the scene. As Sartre writes in Being and Nothingness, “the Other is the indispensable mediator between myself and me. I am ashamed of myself as I appear to the Other. By the mere appearance of the Other, I am put in the position of passing judgment on myself as on an object, for it is an object that I appear to the Other” (222). Later, in the dark of his room, Joe admits, “I felt like … a spy—hollow and not forceful, not able to cause anything” (116). Literally incapacitated by this encounter, forced to see himself through his mother's gaze (and she also is ashamed, though she expresses this emotion through anger), Joe can only ponder the futility of it all: “And I wished for a moment that I was dead …” (116).⁵ Robbed of his subjectivity and “not able to cause anything,” Joe contemplates not existing and the nothingness that threatens to erase his own being.

Faced with what is fleshly and carnal (his mother) and with the emptiness without and within (symbolized by the vacant stare of the bird and Joe's own invisibility), Joe confronts evidence of being and nonbeing, states that defy the use of language to describe or dispel them. Appropriately, Joe offers no explanation of his mother's behavior and describes his own silence in his mother's presence as deliberate. These extremes—his mother's visible nakedness versus his own strange bodily emptiness—render him speechless. He describes her angry countenance, his awareness that she might hit him again, his recognition that he is actually afraid. His mother continues to talk to him, asking him if he wants to leave, telling him that he can tell his father that she's “not up to” (115) making things better. But Joe cannot say a thing, worried that if he speaks his mother will not answer back and that he will then be left with his “own words … to live with, forever” (115). This thought reminds the narrator, who now intrudes in his adult voice, that certain words should not be said and are useless under certain circumstances. “And there are words, significant words, you do not want to say, words that account for busted-up lives, words that try to fix something ruined that shouldn't be ruined … and that words can't fix anyway” (116). Here, then, is Joe's acknowledgment of language's failure.

Confronted by this same failure when his father comes home from fighting the fires, Joe knows that his father wants to know the truth about his mother and Warren Miller, but he cannot bring himself to tell his father the whole story. After answering several of his father's questions, Joe again lapses into silence, because, he says, “I did not say anything else because even though I could see it all in my mind again … I didn't think I knew everything and did not want to pretend I did, or that what I'd seen was the truth” (150-151). Joe makes a distinction here between something that he can see and something that he can know, suggesting that the act of knowing is not based sheerly on empirical evidence but rather on something that defies rational explanation. The “truth” about his parents, their different ways of being unfaithful to each other and the relationship that persists between them, is something that Joe will concede he has never known by the novel's end.

Arguably, the novel's climax centers around Joe's father's own irrational attempt to burn down Warren Miller's house, an act that, like the strange scene that Jackie witnesses in the yard in “Great Falls,” becomes very much a public spectacle. A crowd gathers as Warren Miller emerges from the house with another woman who is wearing silver high-heeled shoes that Joe has seen in a closet in Miller's house. After setting the porch on fire, Jerry remains stationary as Warren strides toward him, cursing him and finally hitting him squarely in the face. During all of this commotion, Joe notices more people coming out of their houses and younger boys angling for better views, a fact punctuated by Warren's angry inquiry, “‘What do you think all these people think of you? A house-burner like this. In front of his own son. I'd be ashamed’” (167). Jerry replies, “‘Maybe they think it was important to me’” (167). But Joe suspects that all of the spectators, including the firemen who have by now arrived, know Warren Miller, whereas “we, my father and I, and my mother, didn't know anyone” (167).⁶ Acknowledging that they had only themselves to “answer for us” (167) if things went wrong, Joe presents his family as self-contained, unbelonging, “strangers” (167). Faced with a crowd of people whose stares can only intensify his family's shame, Joe experiences real isolation, another Sartrean moment when the presence of others only certifies one's loneliness.

In the narrator's own words, “not very much happened” (167) after that. Miller tells the firemen that there has been some misunderstanding; a fireman scolds Jerry harshly for starting such a senseless fire in dry weather, reminding him of the smoldering wildfires that Jerry himself has battled. Joe ends up living with his father when his mother moves out. Warren Miller eventually dies. Joe acknowledges not really having any friends but believing that his life “was like other boys' lives” (175). He has to admit, however, that he “did not have a life except for the life at home with [his] father” (175), a fact that he does not find strange “even now” (175), in his adult voice and from his adult perspective. He does include the detail that the wildfires have continued to burn, that they “did not die out easily” but instead “smoldered all winter” (175), that they could not be put out the way that one would think that they could. The narrator only alludes to the fires' symbolic overtones; he resists the explication himself, leaving the image open to his audience's interpretation.

What Joe does do is to admit his wonderment about the world that has enfolded him so tightly. “I wondered … if I would ever see the world as I had seen it before then, when I did not even know I saw it. … [if] that when you faced the worst and went past it what you found there was nothing. Nothing has its own badness, but it does not last forever” (174). The crisis makes him see the world with a keener eye; he suggests that prior to these events he “did not even know” that he saw the world. Pursuant to this new awareness, though, is Joe's suspicion that he has also encountered something that is not so concrete as the world, a “nothing,” not a something, in fact. Existence and nothingness seem inextricably bound; to know one is to know the other, Joe suggests. Furthermore, the act of knowing is itself a tricky enterprise. After his parents' eventual reunion, Joe can only admit that “God knows there is still much to it that I myself, their only son, cannot fully claim to understand” (177), and with those words the novel ends. This admission is striking given Joe's own assertion throughout the text that his entire world has consisted of his parents and his close observations of the rifts and reunions between them. Despite his rendering of the story, he finally must accede to something that resists explanation: the unknowableness of the two people who were closest to him in the world.

Joe's conclusion, and the novel's, makes no attempt to explain, to analyze, to interpret; rather, it suggests that the mere telling of the story is enough. His transformation of the events into story does not, Joe must admit, make the events make more sense, but he tells it anyway, as if the act itself assumes some significance and in itself redeems the memory of his isolation. Richard Ford has acknowledged his own fascination with loneliness and what he calls its “cure”:

It's what Emerson in his essay on friendship (interestingly enough) calls the “infinite remoteness” that underlies us all. But … [the] predicament is a seminal one; that is, what it inseminates is an attempt to console that remote condition. If loneliness is the disease, then the story is the cure. To be able to tell a story like [Wildlife] about your parents is in itself an act of consolation. Even to come to the act of articulating that your parents are unknowable to each other, unknowable to you, is itself an act of acceptance, an act of some optimism, again in that Sartrean sense that to write about the darkest human possibility is itself an act of optimism because it proves that those things can be thought about.

(Walker 141)

In both “Great Falls” and Wildlife, the events that occur are not spectacular events that require theorizing or explanation. But it is the narrator's way of grappling with his life that transforms it into story material while at the same time allowing the narrator to transcend his past through the self-conscious fashioning of the story. He is at once the present “I” and the future “eye” who sees the events at some distance. It is the adult perspective, in fact, that allows the speaker to frame his search as an epistemological one, and the existential reckoning with the surrounding world accompanies this quest for knowledge about others and the self. In the passage above, Ford provides a lens through which to view his narrators' searches while the texts themselves provoke a Sartrean examination of loneliness and ways of redeeming that state.

In Nausea, Sartre's novel that expounds upon many of the same points that he makes in the more complex Being and Nothingness, the main character, Roquentin, tells his story through a diary which records his efforts to discover something about himself in relation to other people and objects. His epistemological search is essentially a mental one, revolving around his thoughts rather than events that happen to him. His sensation of nausea derives from the notion that he is simultaneously alienated from his consciousness of himself and yet unable to escape it. Doomed to failing relationships with other people as well, Roquentin becomes more and more repulsed by his own body. Finally, though, he experiences a revelation while wandering by the sea and into a garden, and that is that any attempt to categorize a thing using abstract language is a false attempt to understand its being. Language, in fact, is simply imposed on the world by human beings in an attempt to make the world orderly.

Instead, Roquentin discovers the disorderliness of the world, the characteristics that defy groupings and namings by species and kind. In the famous contemplation of the chestnut tree, Roquentin offers this explanation: “This root … existed in such a way that I could not explain it. Knotty, inert, nameless, it fascinated me, filled my eyes, brought me back unceasingly to its own existence. …‘This is a root’—it didn't work any more. I saw clearly that you could not pass from its function as a root, as a breathing pump, to that, to this hard and compact skin of a sea lion, to this oily, callous, headstrong look. The function explained nothing: it allowed you to understand generally that it was a root, but not that one at all” (174). Roquentin himself resorts to metaphor in his description (“breathing pump,” “skin of a sea lion”). The irony, of course, is that he still must use language, but here he employs it differently, not to categorize. The root itself brings him back over and over again to its individual properties, its essence that defies generalizations about roots. When he ponders that the root has been called black, he exlaims, “Black? I felt the word deflating, emptied of meaning with extraordinary rapidity” (175). In other words, the thing will defy the word that normally describes it. Confronted by the root's unrelenting existence, Roquentin must instead use words that are not usually associated with the root in order to even approach capturing its being in language.

What Roquentin ultimately realizes is that only art escapes the realm of existence; art objects—a painting, a song, a novel—are unreal and ideal, transcendent of time. As he hears a voice sing, “Some of these days / You'll miss me, honey” (234), he acknowledges that the record can be scratched, even destroyed, but the song will not cease to exist. Such a thought inspires him, not to commit suicide, as he has already contemplated, but to write a novel that would require its reader to “have to guess, behind the printed words, behind the pages, at something that would not exist, that would be above existence” (237). Likewise he has had to guess at the essence of the root, at what lies behind the words that normally would fail to describe it.

Roquentin's search may also clarify Jackie's search in “Great Falls” and Joe's similar quest in Wildlife, demonstrating how each narrator's discovery of language's failure will not prevent him from telling his story. Time after time in these two narratives, words themselves are emptied of meaning, as quickly as Roquentin cites the deflation of the word “black.” This phenomenon, though, does not obstruct the more complicated effort to create a story that will actually require a probing beyond the words on the page, to get at what the words point to, not just what they say but what they symbolize. To describe that which exists requires metaphor, the deliberate and creative misuse of language that allows the language-user to compare two things that are not usually likened. Significantly, Ford and his narrators do not call attention to moments in their stories that might be named metaphorical or symbolic, as if to suggest that meaning must be derived from language, not dictated by it. Only the repeated patterns of certain words—“knowing,” and “nothing,” for example—invite what Sartre would call the “guess” at something beyond the printed page.

Sartre is certainly not the only philosopher or intellectual to find some sort of redemption in art. Heidegger praises the poetic voice; Kierkegaard notes the importance of the aesthetic reversal. If one is alienated, to read (observe a painting, hear a song, etc.) about another's alienation may to some extent relieve the alienation. Modernist writers including Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens find art the only ballast against an unstable world; Stevens goes so far as to replace religion with art. Regardless of its name, whether it is called despair or anguish by philosophers such as Kierkegaard and Heidegger, or simply “the border between two nothings,” as the narrator of “Great Falls” pronounces, loneliness spurs its host to contemplate something beyond the self. In fact, some cognizance of loneliness in the face of an unyielding universe of the self, the world, or the other seems to be required for art to perform its transcendent function. In this way, then, loneliness is redeeming even as (or precisely because) it necessitates a redemption from its state.

Despite their realizations of language's potential for failure and the frailty of human beings, the narrators of Richard Ford's “Great Falls” and Wildlife decide to reconstruct something that has happened to them, and to tell it in such a way that it becomes a deliberate rendering of a specific time in their lives, a time that continues to open into the future, as their adult voices testify. By the inclusion of remarks that explicate and interpret the past (or that acknowledge that the past cannot be explained), the narrators expose the artifice of their constructions even as they participate in the narratives' unfolding. This process entails forays into musings beyond the simple facts of what has happened, contemplations of senses and objects that in themselves suggest something other than themselves, as the magpie and the fires do in Wildlife. In other words, each narrator transforms a traumatic event into a constructed story: life into art.

Jackie and Joe experience bereavement, disappointment, and betrayal at the hands of their parents, and in both texts, a painful rift between father and mother leaves the son caught between the two, but able to name the unknowableness that characterizes human beings, even those bound by blood. In the ever-widening gap between self and other, these narrators locate the reader, offering some consolation that even that which resists understanding gives way to telling. “If loneliness is the disease, then the story is the cure” (Walker 141), Richard Ford asserts. But loneliness itself is also redemptive, its evocation of nothingness the very state that invites transcendence through art. Language's paradoxical role complicates this endeavor; in fact, each narrator must first realize that there are things that “words cannot fix anyway,” as Joe observes, and times when words cannot even be uttered. As Jean-Paul Sartre explains, language is an imperfect tool, but the attempt to use language figuratively, to force meaning from the unwieldy word despite its inherent imperfection, is itself an act of creativity that reaches beyond the mire and blood of existence. It is in this sense that Richard Ford makes these narrators creators of their own worlds, sovereign over their lives if by nothing else than words and their calling to something beyond their presence on the page.

Notes

1. Sartre's narrator, however, speaks only from the present moment, whereas Ford's narrators speak retrospectively about their lives.

2. A native of Mississippi, Ford and his southern background tempt readers and critics to find in his work characteristics that would ally him with a southern tradition in literature.

3. Walker Percy also read Marcel, Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, in addition to many linguistic and semiotic theorists. Perhaps one key difference between Percy and Ford is that Percy's philosophical apparatus is apt to be more apparent in his fiction. Ford's short fiction, particularly, is sparer in style, more likely to be favored to Ernest Hemingway's or Raymond Carver's work than to Percy's, though, again, in the longer novels, Frank Bascombe has reminded more than one reader of Will Barrett. (And fans of John Updike cite echoes of Harry Angstrom.) More to the point, often imbedded in so-called “minimalist” fiction are complex notions, and Ford is fond of quoting Sartre, Emerson, and Wallace Stevens in conversation.

4. Critics often comment that Ford's musing, “bigger” books, such as The Sportswriter and Independence Day, depart from his earlier more spare style. In these texts, however, the reader may find voices that complement Frank Bascombe's philosophizing one.

5. Jean has also uttered those words to Joe on the page preceding, illustrating her own despair and pent-up frustration.

6. Note again the syntactical separation of “my father and I, and my mother.”

Works Cited

Ford, Richard. “My Mother, in Memory.” Harpers Magazine, August, 1987, 44-57.

———. Rock Springs. New York: Random House/Vintage, 1987.

———. Wildlife. New York: Random House/Vintage, 1990.

———. Women with Men. New York: Knopf, 1997.

Hobson, Fred. The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991.

Percy, Walker. “The Delta Factor.” The Southern Review 11 (1975): 29-64. Reprinted in The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956.

———. Nausea. Translated by Lloyd Alexander. London: Purnell & Sons, 1949.

Walker, Elinor Ann. “An Interview with Richard Ford.” The South Carolina Review 31.2 (1999): 128-43.