Bad Land
Jonathan Raban, in his award winning novel, Bad Land, attempts to describe the migration of homesteaders to eastern Montana in the first decade of this century, and examines the last great wave of American western settlement. More tellingly, Bad Land is somewhat of a memoir; a well edited collection of stories and events that took place during Raban's experiences in the Great American West. His novel is an attempt to redefine a travel book, in which Raban drags us through a century's frontier history. There is no doubt of Raban's excitement and interest in Montana's culture. You can feel Raban's compulsive interest in the West expand as the book progresses, and although there are some wonderful moments when he tries to communicate his excitement to others, as a whole, the novel leaves you with a feeling of, "I guess you had to be there".To describe the way in which Jonathan Raban writes would take little more than one word; emotional. Jonathan Raban writes with such feeling and passion, that you feel the exact sentiments of the people or the surroundings being described. When reading about the loneliness of the land, you too feel as though you are the only human being for hundreds of miles. When getting a sense for the har
The tone of this piece is especially harsh and unforgiving. It's not so much a place as a space, with nothing to give depth or perspective. cry, We can't go on living like this"(page 11). East of the Mississippi, Webb wrote, "civilization stood on three legs - land, water, and timber; west of the Mississippi not one but two of these legs were withdrawn - water and timber - and civilization was left on one leg - land. According to Raban, these pamphlets were distributed across the United States and Europe to boost westward expansion. With in these sections, Raban starts off making connections to the plot he has established, but by the end, he has veered off on to such a tangent that we struggle to focus on the subject at hand. The similar concept hold true in the chapter entitled, "Pictures". The small aperture necessitated by the merciless prairie light kept the foreground in sharp focus. 90 [the farm's debt]? I've made my own pages of calculations in the same distraught writing; seen the numbers gang up on me and breed. Cameron, a wry, whiskery Londoner, had depicted the essence of the prairie in the first years of the century; and with a lens that showed a smaller slice of the visual field than Raban's Pentax did. On the other hand, the structure of chapters brings you back to the familiar organization of a journal. When describing the actual process of removing calves testicles the author uses words like, "plunged.
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Acceptance Essays
