When America was first discovered, it was very much an unsettled land. There was no centralized government, no real established culture, and no official identity. Thus, it became the perfect place for people who were looking to start over. Many of the early settlers were younger brothers who hoped to claim the land that they could not inherit, religious pilgrims who hoped to be able to practice their beliefs, and floundering businessmen who hoped to create a fortune in a new land. What they all had in common was the idea that they could become something better, that in this empty land they could carve their lives into some fantastic image in their minds. Eventually, the ability to do big things in this country warped into the expectation to do something big with one’s opportunity in America. (And by “do something big”, it is meant that it is something big on societal terms.) This is the ideal that eventually became an important part of American culture. It resulted in entire generations growing up learning to measure their lives as the distance from where they were to some far off point in the horizon where they felt they should be.

The late twentieth century showed the consequences of this kind of thinking. Due to a period of rapid technological and social change, America underwent a massive transformation in lifestyle. Thus, much of what had been built became obsolete, and the generation that spent their lives trying to become something suddenly found their entire life’s work to be meaningless. This displacement of an entire generation forced Americans to question the value of all that they had done. The big question looming over them was this: if a change in lifestyle could cause everything that one had worked for to become obsolete, were the goals and ideals they strived for actually worth anything? How should they really be living? The late twentieth century was a period where people sought to find the answer to that question. The result of this was the rejection of the ideals that had been set before them (especially the ideal that a human’s purpose in life is merely to validate his position), and an understanding of their place within a world that is larger than themselves.

One of the first realizations of the now-obsolete generation was that everything, including the values and ideals that they had been told to strive for, was transitory, and even illusory. An example of this is shown in Steinbeck’s short story, “The Leader of the People”. In the story, the main character’s grandfather had been the ideal man of his time. Almost like a hero out of a Wild West novel, he led groups of people, through Indian attacks and murderous terrain, safely to the west coast. However, when he actually reached the coast, his job was done. Once everything was settled, they did not need people like him anymore. His son-in-law even says “Well, how many times do I have to listen to the story of the iron plates, and the thirty-five horses? That time’s done. Why can’t he forget it, now it’s done?” To his children, none of the amazing things that he had done were worth anything, because they no longer mattered in their world. By saying this, the author suggests that as far as the world is concerned, societal ideals only matter insofar as society needs them. There is no actual importance to having attained the ideals. This is shown by the fact that Jody’s grandfather is called by his job title-“the leader of the people”- rather than by his actual name. There is also line at the end where the grandfather says “I was the leader, but if I hadn’t been there, someone else would’ve been the head. The thing had to have a head.” With this line, Jody’s grandfather admits that everything he accomplished was only important in terms of society’s needs at the time.
Even worse, the story hints that many of the ideals that people are told to strive for are not even real, or at least, they aren’t how people picture them to be. The story describes people like Jody’s grandfather as “the great phantoms”, suggesting that they were something ghostlike and unreal. In addition, all of grandfather’s “greatness” came either from Jody’s thoughts (“Jody lay in his bed and thought of the impossible world of Indians and buffaloes…” and “He thought of Grandfather on a huge white horse, marshaling the people.”), or from the stories that the grandfather tells about himself. This suggests that the idea of greatness is manufactured. This is supported by the fact when the grandfather is not trying to tell stories, he likens his killing of Native Americans to Jody’s killing of the mice; he basically says that there was nothing glorious in what they did because the Indians were such inferior opponents to them. (This is shown by the dialogue between him and Jody where Jody tells the grandfather that he is about to go and kill mice. The grandfather’s response: “Have the people of this generation come down to hunting mice? They aren’t very strong, the new people, but I hardly thought mice would be game for them”. Then he says: “…when the troops were hunting Indians and shooting children and burning teepees, it wasn’t much different from your mouse hunt.”) These lines, and the line that he says towards the end of the story (“I tell those old stories, but they’re not what I want to tell. I only know how I want people to feel when I tell them”), highlights how he really feels about what he did. The fact that there is such a gap between how he really feels and the idealized version that he presents to other people raises the question of whether all of the ideals that people had embraced were nothing more than just stories made up by other people.

As society was hit with cultural change, it understandably began to ask just how true many of the things that they had taken to be fundamental were. In literature, this became a questioning of traditional ideas of writing and communication. For example, William Gass’ “The Medium of Fiction” argues that the idea of creating structure out of words, the idea that was (and sort of still is) seen as a staple of proper writing, is exactly what makes writing ineffective. He supports his argument by first saying that “a word is a concept made flesh-the eternal presented as noise”. By doing so, he first acknowledges that there is a “conceptual” world that is separate from the physical world (assuming that he’s drawing from Plato, the conceptual world is what something is truly like, sort of like its essence. The physical world is that essence filtered through humans.) Then he says that there is no way that the words that we have can capture that conceptual idea. According to him, this is because words have every day connotations to them. For example, “A sign like GENTS, for instance, tells me where to pee. It conveys information. It produces feelings of glad relief”. Because of this, the reader will keep these associated meanings with them as they read. Hass says that the only solution to this (besides attempting to purify the meanings of those words through poetry), is to write as is, “…by following as closely as he can our simplest, most direct, and unaffected forms of daily talk, for we report real things, things which intrigue and worry us, and such resembling gossip in a book allows us to believe in figure and events we cannot see…” Essentially, he is saying that humans understand and react more to the connotations of the words than they do to some pure, conceptual meaning of the word. Therefore, it would make more sense to write in a way that embraces all of the everyday connotations that come with it.
Robert Hass, in his poem “Meditation at Lagunitas”, also challenges the basic assumption that there is a perfect “concept” of something that people should be trying to capture with words. He does not agree with the idea “That the clown-/ faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk/of that black birch is, by his presence,/some tragic falling off from a first world/ of undivided light.” Basically what he is saying in that sentence is that just because our definition of the word “woodpecker” has all of the daily-use nuances and concepts that go along with that definition, our definition might not be any less than the “ideal” of a woodpecker. (I am including this argument even though it is similar to the argument above because there is one important difference; while Gass still subscribes to the idea that the conceptual meaning is better than what we can create with words, Haas says that the created meaning is just as good.) He argues that by trying to hold anything to the perfect idea that is behind something, one loses the immediate, real world meaning of a word. (As evidenced by the lines “…After a while I understood that/talking this way [aka. Talking about things as if they were to be compared to some ideal], everything dissolves: justice/ pine, hair, woman, you and I”. He is saying that they “dissolve” because the immediate, personal understanding of the word disappears into the larger “ideal” meaning.) In the last example, he makes his argument with the real life experience of making love to a woman. For him, the experience evokes a very personal and specific response: “I felt a wonder at her presence/like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river/with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat/muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish/called pumpkinseed.” His personal understanding of her (shown by the later lines “…the way her hands dismantled bread/the thing her father said that hurt her/what she dreamed”) does not make the response that he feels any less powerful. (Just like how a personal understanding of words does not ruin their effect.) Finally, the poem ends with the lines “Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings/saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry” Earlier in the poem, Hass had mentioned that the original way of thinking was that “because there is in this world no one thing/to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds/a word is elegy to what it signifies.” (Basically, that the word “blackberry” could never get at the “true essence” of a blackberry). With these last two lines, suggests another way of thinking about it. He is saying here that the word “blackberry” does not need to get at the essence, that it can create an effect just as it is understood.
(The above paragraphs are specifically about the questioning of structure in writing. Movements in literature however, point to the mindset of the people who wrote them. Therefore, if authors were questioning and redefining traditional ideas of writing, as well as advocating a way of writing that emphasized a personal understanding of words [if one is to use words with all of its everyday connotations intact, then the meanings of those words are personal to each person because those connotations would be different for each person], that points to a questioning of traditional ideas in general, and a movement towards an individual approach to understanding life of rather than some blanket method.)
As the people of the late twentieth century began to reject the idea that a purpose in life was to live up to societal ideals, they also started trying to figure out exactly how they were to live. The general trend was towards letting go of the idea that life needs to be goal oriented and an understanding of how little humanity as a whole could possibly know about the world. (Of course, there could be an individual understanding, as shown by Gass and Haas, but as a whole, there is no overarching knowledge that applies to everyone.)This was the logical conclusion to the two understandings that were discussed in the above paragraphs. With the awareness that societal ideals (which may not even have been honest) change all the time, there would have been no reason to continue a life that sought to become an ideal. With the knowledge that the foundations that people had built their lives upon could be subjective, people had to realize that there were very little constants that they could actually know about the world. The final result was that people learned to live in a way that was more process based than goal oriented. Because they were so little and so incapable of knowing, life became about experiencing things rather than reaching towards an endpoint. This idea shows up in W.S Merwin’s poem, “For the Anniversary of My Death”. In the poem, the speaker talks about how he feels comfort in the fact that nature is larger than himself. In the first few lines, he acknowledges that death is something much bigger than himself, so big that he can neither predict nor control it. (“Every year without knowing it I have passed the day/when the last fires will wave to me/And the silence will set out…/like the beam of a lightless star”) He then talks about how after he dies, he will no longer have to deal with the issues of “…the earth/And the love of one woman/And the shamelessness of men”. Essentially, he is saying that he finds it comforting that these human things, which would seem big to someone who is alive, are eventually going to get taken up by something as large as death. Finally, in the last few lines “As today writing after three days of rain/Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease/And bowing not knowing to what”, the author makes note of the sound of the wren after constant rain. One way of interpreting that line is to see it as the narrator being in wonder of the sound of the wren, that after three days of rain, he is just happy to listen to it again. If this interpretation is correct, then it shows that, in light of his own insignificance in comparison to the world, the author has decided that he appreciates being alive and while he is alive, he will appreciate the experiences for what they are.
This kind of thinking is a dramatic change from the thinking that had prevailed beforehand. In the work of the earlier author Ernest Hemingway, the world was meant to be nothing more than a thing to be used. (For example, in The Sun Also Rises, there is a scene where Jake and Bill go fishing. The act of fishing in that story is an act of dominance on Jake’s part. [Here’s the actual quote: “…I felt that I had one and I brought him, fighting and bending the rod almost double…He was a good trout, and I banged his head against the timber so that he quivered out straight…] As far as Hemingway was concerned, fishing was just a way for the men to validate their manliness.) In order to see the world as just something to be used by people, it would make sense to say that Hemingway saw people as being most important and everything else as being subordinate. By the time we reach Merwin, there is practically a complete reversal. Merwin saw himself as being an insignificant part of the world. His view is almost like naturalism, but with one large difference. While people who subscribed to naturalism felt that the human’s only purpose was to be used by nature (I am basing this opinion on the short stories of Jack London that we read, especially “The Law of Life”), Merwin didn’t seem to think that humans even needed a purpose. According to him, death is bigger than anything that humans can ever do, and so any purposes that humans try to make for themselves would be useless. For Merwin, that is a peaceful thought.

Another author who almost came to the same conclusion as Merwin was Jack Kerouac. His book, The Dharma Bums, describes his attempts to become “a perfect Dharma Bum”. Kerouac’s situation is a bit different from the situation that I discussed earlier in the essay; he is not trying to live up to a societal ideal. However, at the start of the novel he is still trying to live up to the part self-created/ part Japhy-imposed/part Buddhist-inspired ideal. For example, Ray decides to climb up a mountain on Japhy’s suggestion, and when Japhy decides that he wants to climb to the top of the mountain, Ray’s response was “Well if you’re gonna go I’m goin with you” (Page 61) Unlike Japhy, he did not manage to make it to the top. However, it is the very fact that he did not make it up the mountain that teaches him that “…it’s impossible to fall off mountains…” (Page 64) If the hike up the mountain was symbolic for Ray’s attempt to become closer to his ideal, then the fact that he did not make it to the top, yet still gained something from the experience fits in the idea introduced by Hass. (Basically, that something does not have to be in its ideal state in order to be of value.) This idea is reinforced later in the book when Ray is hitchhiking his way across the country. He meets Beaudry on his way back, and even though he’ll never see Beaudry again (ie. there will never be an ideal friendship and their relationship will probably never serve a purpose after the trip), he still befriended him. (No specific line, but pages 97-99 show this) This fits in with Merwin’s idea to live life as is, and to appreciate what is around him.

Despite all of these events however, Ray is unhappy throughout the book because he is unable become a proper “Buddhist” First, he is unable to stay away from the material world that he so despises. On Matterhorn for example, his friend Morley brought all kinds materials that seemed to Ray and Japhy like they were unnecessary for a spiritual hike. (“We sighed when we saw the huge amount of junk he wanted to take on this trip: even canned goods, and besides his rubber mattress a whole lot of pickax and whatnot equipment we’d never really need.”[page 29]) However, when Ray is stuck on top of a freezing mountain, the first thing he says is “I really was amazed by the wisdom of Morley now…” (Page 64) After the hike, the first thing Ray wants to do is to eat at a nice restaurant. Also, he starts to realize that part of being a “Buddhist” is to define oneself very strictly. After his friend Rosie commits suicide, for example, he confides to Japhy “There were things I wanted to tell Rosie and I felt suppressed by this schism we have about separating Buddhism from Christianity, East from West, what the hell differences does it make?" For Ray, the concepts in Buddhism are just different phrases for the same concepts as in Christianity. However, in order to be the kind of Buddhist that Japhy is, Ray is told that he has to make the distinction. He doesn’t understand why, and this frustrates him.
It is not until Ray goes to Desolation Peak that he is actually happy. Kerouac describes Desolation Peak as being on this massive scale, with “Mad raging sunsets poured in seafoams of cloud through unimaginable crags…one blade of grass jiggling in the winds of infinity…” (Page 183) In short, it is a huge mountain. It is from being a part of something so massive that Ray can realize “....the career of your life is like a raindrop in the illimitable ocean which is eternal awakenerhood.” (Page 184) Like with Merwin, it is this knowledge that he is insignificant that eventually convinces him to let go of all the earthly things that frustrate him. (The lines in particular are these: ‘…there is no answer.’ I didn’t know anything anymore, I didn’t care, and it didn’t matter, and suddenly I felt really free. [page 184]) It is with the realization that he does not need to go search for some kind of answer that finally allows Ray to be happy. (Again, like Merwin)
In short, the late twentieth century experienced massive change in thinking about how to live. Whereas the generations beforehand had built a structure to live by, people at this point found the structure to be unsatisfactory. Their attempts to redefine the structure resulted their understanding of how futile that was, and then in getting rid of structure completely.