Lesley Grove
Wilson
LTEL 155B
22 October 2008
Trout Fishing in America
In Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, this is the refrain we hear throughout the novella as a whole. “Trout fishing in America” is used to represent just about everything and anything one could think of in this very poetically written novella. Brautigan writes stories within chapters, many are personal conquests of travel, relationships, memories, or lessons learned, but there are also fictional anecdotes and characters that help get the point across. He spends a significant amount of time discussing trips out to nature that he or other characters have made, in which they could not escape their own haunting of the urban life.
There are many chapters in which Bruatigan touches on the idea that the media and technology we all deal with nowadays is dominating nature, and our minds, when we are out interacting with nature, always thinking about the urban life, never escaping the control it has over us. A big example of this idea is in the chapter “The Hunchback Trout”, where he repeatedly mentions feeling “just like a telephone repairman,” (Brautigan 55). He sees the trees surrounding the creek as “12, 845 telephone booths in a row with high Victorian ceilings and all the doors taken off and all the backs of the booths knocked out” (Brautigan 55). So he paints a picture of nature and technology together to help us understand his problem of not being able to escape urbanization, how he can be in one completely calm and serene place, yet still be so wrapped up in another. He even mentions “clocking in” several times, as if trout fishing was a job he needed to complete to do his part in society. Bruatigan, as well as most other people, can’t seem to get away from the working life, even in complete nature; we are still consumed by what is happening back home in the city from which we came.
Though Brautgan talks about technology dominating nature as a negative thing, he also speaks about it in a harmonizing way, where trout fishing represents the harmony of man and machine, as shown in his poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.” In this poem, Brautigan is hoping for a cybernetic meadow, forest, and ecology, “where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky” (Brautigan 1). The idea of bringing the two worlds together makes us “free of out labors, and joined back to nature” (Brautigan 1), where we can return to our roots while still having been brought up surrounded by all the capitalism and technology that we have.
Wilson
LTEL 155B
22 October 2008
Trout Fishing in America
In Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, this is the refrain we hear throughout the novella as a whole. “Trout fishing in America” is used to represent just about everything and anything one could think of in this very poetically written novella. Brautigan writes stories within chapters, many are personal conquests of travel, relationships, memories, or lessons learned, but there are also fictional anecdotes and characters that help get the point across. He spends a significant amount of time discussing trips out to nature that he or other characters have made, in which they could not escape their own haunting of the urban life.
There are many chapters in which Bruatigan touches on the idea that the media and technology we all deal with nowadays is dominating nature, and our minds, when we are out interacting with nature, always thinking about the urban life, never escaping the control it has over us. A big example of this idea is in the chapter “The Hunchback Trout”, where he repeatedly mentions feeling “just like a telephone repairman,” (Brautigan 55). He sees the trees surrounding the creek as “12, 845 telephone booths in a row with high Victorian ceilings and all the doors taken off and all the backs of the booths knocked out” (Brautigan 55). So he paints a picture of nature and technology together to help us understand his problem of not being able to escape urbanization, how he can be in one completely calm and serene place, yet still be so wrapped up in another. He even mentions “clocking in” several times, as if trout fishing was a job he needed to complete to do his part in society. Bruatigan, as well as most other people, can’t seem to get away from the working life, even in complete nature; we are still consumed by what is happening back home in the city from which we came.
Though Brautgan talks about technology dominating nature as a negative thing, he also speaks about it in a harmonizing way, where trout fishing represents the harmony of man and machine, as shown in his poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.” In this poem, Brautigan is hoping for a cybernetic meadow, forest, and ecology, “where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky” (Brautigan 1). The idea of bringing the two worlds together makes us “free of out labors, and joined back to nature” (Brautigan 1), where we can return to our roots while still having been brought up surrounded by all the capitalism and technology that we have.
Richard Brautigan is constantly borrowing experiences from his own life to really show us his roots and where we have all evolved from to get to where we are now. By making his writing personal we are able to connect with his writing and contemplate his arguments and points, because we know this is real and that not only are these Brautigan’s struggles, but they are our struggles too. We have to realize the difference between the urban life and the rural life, and that they are slowly merging together, whether for better or for worse. Unless we take a hold of it now, the two worlds will eventually become completely blended together and we will have no escape from either one.
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