In many of Whitman's Civil War poems, Whitman focuses on dead or wounded soldiers and draws particular attention to grotesque and often disturbing images. In “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest,” he writes, “Surgeons operating, assistants holding the lights, the smell of ether, the smell of blood / The crowd, or the crowd of bloody forms” The motivation of Whitman to write these Civil War poems, which derive from notes he took while working as a nurse, served to ensure that the horrors of war were not lost and forgotten amidst stories of heroism and glory. By calling attention to the corporeal and tactile aspects of the war piles of wounded soldiers and the smell of military hospitals, it goes against the human tendency towards mythologizing. Similarly, Twain uses animals in Roughing It to demystify the idea of ​​the Great American West. Hidden beneath a series of amusing anecdotes lies a serious undercurrent of disappointment and loss of innocence. As the narrator encounters the animals, he is brought to a progressively lower level, symbolizing the failure of his expectations and Twain's deflation of the mythical ideal of the West. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Early in the book, Twain exposes the myth of the West in the narrator's naïve speculations about his future journey. He writes: Very soon he would be hundreds and hundreds of miles away, in the great plains and deserts, and in the mountains of the Wild West, and he would be seeing buffalo and Indians, prairie dogs and antelope, and having all kinds of adventures . , and maybe get hanged or scalped, and have a good time, and write home and tell us all about it, and be a hero. (29)The subsequent compound sentences demonstrate the narrator's childlike optimism and unshakable faith in the myth of the West. Here the act of seeing buffalo, prairie dogs, and antelope is equated with other mythical adventures, showing how animals have also become an integral part of the idea of ​​the West. With this exaggerated conception of animals in mind, Twain constructs the story so that each encounter with an animal causes the experience to fall far short of the narrator's expectations. The narrator's first encounter with an animal is his sighting of the "donkey rabbit". The ridiculousness of this animal is heightened by the way the narrator constructs it, saying, "we saw the first specimen of an animal familiarly known over more than two thousand miles of mountains and deserts from Kansas to the Pacific Ocean" (37) . From the introduction it seems that what he is about to mention is a species revered throughout the country; in other words, the animal appears to have the same mythical status as "buffalo, prairie dogs, and antelope." Instead, what he describes is an animal with "preposterous ears" that is scared almost to death by a breaking twig. Although this marks the beginning of Twain's demythologizing of the West, it is important to note that here the narrator is not yet delusional, but rather asserts his superiority over the animal, shooting it and making it "humped" (38). It is only shortly thereafter that the narrator himself is compromised, and his fall from innocence is more pronounced. At the beginning of his journey, at the Station House, the narrator says: "It was here that we suffered the first diminution of our princely state. We left our six fine horses and took in their place six mules." His transfer to a baser animal, the mule, marks the beginning of his fall from both literal and figurative innocence. The reader knows that the narrator identifies the mule with the ridiculous donkey rabbit, for he says:"Nothing can bear the taste [of mugwort] except the donkey and his illegitimate child, the mule. But their testimony of its nutrition is noteworthy, for they will eat pine knots, or anthracite coal, or fillings of brass, or lead pipes" (39). However, whereas before the narrator could shoot the ridiculous donkey rabbit from his superior position in the carriage, he must now degrade himself to riding a mule, thus lowering himself to his status and continuing to deflate the myth of the West. The narrator continues this trend in his description of the coyote. He prefaces his tale of the coyote by invoking his idealized conception of the West on the first page. of the book, saying, “About an hour after breakfast we saw the first villages of prairie dogs, the first antelope, and the first wolf” (49). coyote as "a long, thin, diseased and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolf pelt stretched over it, a fairly bushy tail that always droops with a desperate expression of abandonment and misery, a furtive and malignant eye, and a long sharp look face" Furthermore, she describes him as a "living, breathing allegory of need" and as "always hungry". The first description of the animal follows convention by failing to meet the narrator's expectations. The second, however, involving want and hunger, foreshadows the narrator's encounter with the physical scarcity of the Western landscape (e.g. the desert) and the greed of its inhabitants (e.g. pocket miners). In crossing the alkaline desert, the narrator's experiences continue to fall short of his expectations and he physically descends to an even lower level. It is not surprising that he prefaces his story by announcing his glorious idea of ​​crossing the desert, saying: "This was a beautiful novel, romantic, dramatically adventurous, worth living for, worth traveling for! We would write about it at home" ( 115). ). However, he quickly admits that his enthusiasm "withered in the sultry August sun and didn't last more than an hour." Soon after, he describes the coach as "crawling like a bug." This particular simile is particularly important because it highlights the narrator's reduction in status. Not long before, the narrator was traveling luxuriously in a horse-drawn carriage; then he exchanged his horses for mules, and now crosses the desert, "crawling like an insect." Just as Whitman evokes images of the body to demystify war, Twain reduces the narrator from a noble status to one in which he is equated with an insect crawling on the ground. His physical descent as well as movement downward in the "social hierarchy" of animals emphasizes his fall from innocence and his inability to realize the myth of the West. The narrator continues his "fall" into Carson City in Mrs. O'Flannigan's house. when a pack of tarantulas rampage among the boarders. When the "zephyr" blast causes the roof to fall and shatter on their part of the ranch, the released tarantulas send the boarders scurrying about like the eight-legged beasts themselves. Twain writes: The scene presented when the lantern flashed into the room was picturesque, and might have been amusing to some people, but it was not amusing to us. Although we were perched so strangely on boxes and trunks and beds, and dressed so strangely too, we were too sincerely sorrowful and too sincerely unhappy to see anything amusing, and there was not the shadow of a smile visible from any part. I know I am not capable of suffering any more than I suffered during those few minutes of suspense in the dark, surrounded by those crawling, bloody tarantulas. (132). Here, the narrator and his fellow boarders are brought even further down the animal hierarchy,to the level of "crawling and bloody tarantulas". The narrator continues to recount cases involving animals that his experiences fall into. progressively further from its initial high expectations. For example, when crossing the snowy desert with Ballou and Ollendorff, the narrator and his companions face what they believe to be a near-death experience, but end up suffering only substantial losses of dignity.2E They trudge wearily through the snow until they become hopelessly lost amidst to nothingness (their horses have abandoned them) and they lie down expecting to breathe their last breath of life. The episode's dark humor lies in the narrator's realization in the morning: "I got up, and there, in the gray dawn, not fifteen paces from us, were the frame buildings of a stagecoach station, and below in a shed were our still saddled and bridled horses!" (182). Continuing the trend of downward movement, the travelers find themselves lying in the snow, willingly surrendering to death, with their horses standing above them. Their physical proximity to the ground and the superior position of the horses emphasizes both the idea of ​​the "fall" and the use of animals to demystify the West. In another instance, in the Sandwich Islands, he describes a landscape that is "as tranquil as the dawn in the Garden of Eden," and revels in the luxury of forgetting that there is "any world but these enchanted islands" (341). His Edenic bliss is soon cut short, however, when he says, "It was such ecstasy to dream, and dream until you got a bite. A scorpion bite." The scorpion, which he describes as a "hairy tarantula on stilts," is not only grotesque, but, more importantly, an ugly creature that runs along the surface of the earth. His physical proximity to the ground continues the narrator's literal and figurative fall from innocence, while Twain's grotesque language scares the reader away from the narrator's mythical descriptions and into a stark reality. Twain brilliantly develops the notion of distance as a symbol of collapse. of the American dream. In the midst of his success as a journalist in Virginia City, the narrator stops to comment on the California landscape, saying, "I will observe here, in passing, that all California landscapes require distance to give them their greatest charm" (304). The meaning of this statement, which he develops at length, is that the charm of the landscape, as well as of the entire West, can only be appreciated from a distant perspective. More specifically, East Coasters tend to mythologize the beauty and exotic allure of the West, but that's only because they aren't physically close enough to see its imperfections. What Twain is getting at here is the notion of the frontier seen from an Eastern perspective. The somewhat hardened narrator dispels the tendency of Easterners to see the West in mythical terms, and instead reverses the perspective. As he says: One of the strangest things I know is hearing tourists from "the United States" rave about the beauty of "ever-blooming California." And they always fall into that kind of ecstasy. But perhaps they would modify them if they knew how the old Californians are amazed and filled with adoring admiration, at the presence of the sumptuous richness, the brilliant greenery, the infinite freshness and the foliage which make an oriental landscape a vision of Paradise itself. (305) In dispelling the mythical ideal of the West, Twain employs vertical as well as horizontal distance. At the end of the chapter he writes: Some of us, six thousand feet above the sea, looked down, as birds do, on the immortal summer of the Sacramento Valley, with its fruitful fields, its feathery foliage, its streams silver, all of them".