Document Type
Review Essay
Abstract
[First paragraph]
When Huck lights out for the territories at the end of his hopeless float down the river with Jim, it's already clear that his escape will solve nothing. The story he will become part of in the West is already one of multiple displacements moving fast toward the environmental catastrophe of the dust bowl. Yet long before the frontier was "closed," it inspired myths that would prove to be more persistent than its reality. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the West still represents the pure possibility to remake identity and to leave behind the corruption of Huck's "sivilization" or Edward Abbey's "siphilization." The myths of Western escape and remaking have long functioned to deliver characters from crisis and failure into something different. The real drama lies in whether the difference is truly new or only an altered setting for the same old story.
Repository Citation
Monsma, Bradley J.. "On Roxana Robinson's Sweetwater." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 6, no. 3, 2006, pp. 1–4. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol6/iss3/17