Little Big Man

Finally, Jack is able to cast even the most famous battle in the history of the Old West into unexpectedly philosophical terms, seeing it for its unity rather than its conflict:

Looking at the great universal circle, my dizziness grew still. I wasn’t wobbling no more. I was there, in movement, yet at the center of the world, where all is self-explanatory merely because it is. Being at the Greasy Grass or not, and on whichever side, and having survived or perished, never made no difference.

We had all been men. Up there, on the mountain, there was no separations (this page).

It is through observations such as this that Jack transcends some of the limitations of both white and Indian worldviews, coming to understand, as Frederick Turner puts it, “both myth and history as radically human constructs.”

Although in many ways the story of Jack’s narrative is more fascinating than the story of his life, one aspect of that life is particularly significant: Jack’s quest is always for freedom. All the self-reflexive or meta-literary elements in this novel finally exist to direct our attention to the relationship between language and freedom. And it is in this light that Little Big Man, a literal model of the traditional “captivity narrative” most directly dramatizes Berger’s fascination with the ways in which language serves to make captives of us all.

In this one fundamental respect, Berger’s contribution to the literature of the frontier strikes a radically new note. Whether by virtue of a noble primitivism, as in the case of Cooper’s Leatherstocking, or by virtue of an opportunistic amorality, as in the case of most of the frontier characters of the southwestern humorists or the “wild and woolly” heroes of the Beadle dime novels, or Huck Finn striking out for new territory, the western hero has been at bottom the very exemplar of individual freedom—often of anarchic freedom. Deadwood Dick, for example, is beyond the reach of almost all obligations because he has survived hanging as a thief, a feat Jack approaches by surviving at the Little Bighorn.

What finally distinguishes Jack from Deadwood Dick and his other American literary predecessors is that he is not free: he may escape the trappings of captivity, whether at the hands of the Indians, the Pendrakes, or of commerical creditors, but Jack remains the slave of his own standards—his haunting sense of obligation to definitions. Jack repeatedly states his admiration for others who understand real freedom, but Jack cannot himself escape the bonds of his own definitions. As he diagnoses his own problem when he runs away from the Pendrakes, intending to return to the Cheyenne: “God knows I thought enough about it and kept telling myself I was basically an Indian, just as when among Indians I kept seeing how I was really white to the core” (this page). No matter how desperate or low his situation, Jack maintains his faith in codes of conduct but he cannot reconcile the competing claims of the Cheyenne standards—which he understands and respects—with white standards—which he simply cannot keep from measuring himself against, no matter how unjustified or contradictory he knows them to be. When Jack opens his narrative with the claim “I am a white man and never forgot it,” he refers to his personal curse more than to a matter of racial pride.

The problem is that Jack’s sense of himself always looks beyond the concrete satisfaction of his very real accomplishments to the impossibly abstract ideal of civilization; Jack judges himself not as a man but as a white man. Hard-nosed pragmatist or cynic in so many things, Jack is a sucker for the ideal of civilization and progress even though he finds the reality inexorably disappointing. For him, Mrs. Pendrake emblemizes civilization, even when her actual conduct profoundly disillusions him:

She always knowed the right thing so far as civilization went, like an Indian knows it for savagery.…

I figured to have got the idea of white life, right then. It hadn’t ought to do with the steam engine or arithmetic or even Mr. Pope’s verse. Its aim was to turn out a Mrs. Pendrake (this page).

The point of all of this is that while Jack’s sensibility is beyond sentimentality in most matters, at heart it is hopelessly romantic in its acceptance of the myth of progress and civilization, the myth of white culture that steamrolled the West. Intellectually, Jack is all for the Indian concern with what is as opposed to the white preoccupation with how things should be, but his commitment never grows firm enough to afford him any satisfaction.