The Creation and Destruction of Surrogate Worlds in Montana Literature

Montana writers create surrogate worlds where their characters escape the oppressiveness of the real world. The vast and varied landscape of Montana is more than a setting for many of these authors. It becomes symbolic of a national mind set that the open land will offer redemption or inner peace. Therefore, many characters become one with their natural environment. However, the writers destroy their alternative worlds by introducing emotion or real world problems into it. Four Montana writers will be examined in detail. In Chapter II, I discuss Myron Brinig's Wide Open Town and his use of surrogate worlds. Brinig creates thresholds to the other realm but cannot allow his characters to cross over because his naturalistic beliefs prevent it. In Chapter III, I examine A. B. Guthrie's The Big Sky. Guthrie shows what life is like inside the surrogate world by immersing one character, Boone Caudill, into the other realm. However, the author destroys Boone's world by introducing emotion that the main character cannot control. In Chapter N, I examine Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It. Like Brinig, and Guthrie, Maclean creates a surrogate world so that his characters can escape and find moments of perfection. However, they cannot sustain the perfection because of the pull of the real world. These three authors' characters find temporary redemption, salvation, and moments of perfection in the surrogate world. The conclusion addresses the future of surrogate worlds in Montana literature. As the landscape vanishes in the state so to does the prevalence of alternative worlds in the fiction. Montana becomes more like the rest of the country, and so does its fiction. Writers like Larry Watson, Richard Ford, and Toni Volk use surrogate worlds but not for much more than a literary device that exposes the characters' limitations in real life. An author who shows the future of surrogate worlds, James Crumley, offers the notion that the landscape, thus the surrogate world, is no longer enough. From the landscape, one can obtain no salvation or perfection.