Thomas Berger
LITTLE BIG MAN

To Mary Redpath

Introduction: The Measure of Little Big Man

HAD THOMAS BERGER never written anything other than Little Big Man, he would have earned a respected place in American literary history. Just as surely as there can be no single “Great American Novel,” Little Big Man has by now been almost universally recognized as a great American novel, and while its genius was not immediately apparent to large numbers of readers or to all initial reviewers, that genius has now been recognized by some two dozen scholarly studies and uninterrupted popular sales in the more than forty years since it was first published. As L. L. Lee so accurately observed in one of the first articles to give careful consideration to Little Big Man: “This is a most American novel. Not just in its subject, its setting, its story (these are common matters), but in its thematic structures, in its dialectic: savagery and civilization, indeed, but also the virgin land and the city, nature and the machine, individualism and community, democracy and hierarchy, innocence and knowledge, all the divisive and unifying themes of the American experience, or, more precisely, of the American ‘myth.’ ” Surely Frederick Turner was correct when he concluded in a 1977 reassessment of Little Big Man for The Nation that “few creative works of post-Civil War America have had as much of the fiber and blood of the national experience in them.” It now seems safe to predict that Little Big Man the novel will match its survival skills against those of Jack Crabb, its 111-year old protagonist. And in some ways, Little Big Man must be acknowledged as Berger’s greatest novel, the one in which he took on the sweeping matter of his American literary and mythological heritage and made a lasting contribution to both.

Little Big Man is a story purporting to tell the “truth” about the old American West. It is ostensibly transcribed from the tape-recorded reminiscences of “the late Jack Crabb-frontiersman, Indian scout, gunfighter, buffalo hunter, adopted Cheyenne-in his final days upon this earth.” That Jack’s final days come some 111 years after his first, and that he claims to have been the sole white survivor of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, puts this “truth” in some doubt. Equally strong and contradictory evidence exists that the last of the old-timers is hopelessly senile and that he is a fiction maker as concerned with developing his own story as a narrative to be read as he is with relating the incidents of his life. Furthermore, Jack’s narrative comes to us through the patently unreliable editorship of one “Ralph Fielding Snell,” a fatuously gullible and weak-minded self-professed “man of letters,” who not so incidentally reveals a number of parallels between his life and that of his narrator. Snell, who does admit to some doubts about Jack’s story, also admits that he passes on its claims only after his own emotional collapse of some ten years, and his foreword and epilogue contain numerous hints that this emotional condition persists.

Yet against all of this postmodern self-reflexivity stands the disarming realism of Jack’s tale, the authority and credibility of his voice. The action in Little Big Man is episodic, its story a macaronic of historical events and personages, its atmosphere the swirling myths that transformed people and events into America’s defining epoch: the West. What unites the disparate threads of the novel’s action and its swings between the antithetical world views of white and Indian cultures is Jack’s voice and vision as he takes his place in the great American literary tradition started by James Fenimore Cooper with his character, Natty Bumppo-the legendary Leatherstocking.

Significantly unlike Leatherstocking, however, Jack can be counted on to describe frontier life with both humor and accuracy. Whatever else may be said of Jack Crabb, let there be no doubt that he gets things right whenever he speaks of customs or events in the Old West. Indeed, Jack’s description of Cheyenne life draws heavily from anthropological studies such as E. Adamson Hoebel’s The Cheyennes: Indians of the Great Plains and George Bird Grinnell’s The Fighting Cheyennes. Likewise, when Jack speaks of Custer or the cavalry, the fine points and drawbacks of specific handguns, the growth of frontier cities, or other matters of white culture, he is equally accurate and often insightful. There is simply no way of knowing how many of Jack’s experiences Berger directly or indirectly drew from other sources. Acknowledging many of those sources, Berger says of his research: “After reading some seventy books about the Old West I went into a creative trance in which it seemed as though I were listening to Jack Crabb’s narrative.” The brilliance of Little Big Man, however, has much more to do with Berger’s principles of selection, combination, and comment than with the diversity and accuracy of his sources.

And it should not be overlooked that Jack also consistently offers a folksy-sounding but astute critical commentary on the literature of the West. Indeed, one of the wonderful ironies inherent in Berger’s structure is that Jack, the ostensible man of action, reveals much more literary sophistication than does Snell, the ostensible “man of letters.” Just as surely as Jack’s account of his life explores the nature and importance of western myths-both white and Indian-it also explores the linguistic and literary mechanics of myth-making, whether in history, anthropology, journalism, or the novel itself.

Berger has so crafted Jack’s voice as to make it at once a part of and comment on the process through which the Old West has been created for the public by language. First and foremost, Jack is a storyteller, with his primary allegiance to language rather than to history. Actually, as Berger would no doubt specify, history is language, and perhaps nowhere is this more true than in the case of the “history” of the American frontier. One of the most appropriate ways in which Berger designed Little Big Man as the “Western to end all Westerns” was to make Jack’s voice and character such an obvious pastiche of fact and fantasy, of literary myths and received truths. From Cooper onward the literature of the frontier has been filled with seemingly crude and unlettered characters who ultimately drop their rough personae to reveal either noble birth or genteel background and education. Berger plays against this specific western convention by keeping Jack’s persona scrupulously democratic and unprivileged while allowing just enough narrative sophistication to show through to call Jack’s true nature into question.

One of Berger’s most significant stylistic accomplishments is the creation in Jack of an “unsophisticated” colloquial voice that captures the essence of the American frontier vernacular but escapes its limitations. The vernacular ring to Jack’s voice rises primarily from a smattering of well-codified colloquialisms: “commenced to,” “a deal of,” “they was,” “knowed,” and so on. Combined with Jack’s use of natural, historically appropriate metaphors and the accuracy and specificity of his details, this technique more than masks the sophistication of Jack’s narrative technique. Using relatively few of these colloquial code words, Berger efficiently imparts backwoods credibility to Jack’s narration without limiting the precision of either his syntax or his diction.

In fact, what is most remarkable is that Jack’s voice rings so true while also containing so many unexpected signs of sophistication. Included in his vocabulary are such unlikely terms as: “recumbent,” “quandary,” “signification,” “obdurate,” and “circumferentially.” And more significant than this erudite vocabulary are the delightful precision and rhetorical craft of many of Jack’s sentences, such as this one:

As I say, none of us understood the situation, but me and Caroline was considerably better off than the chief, because we only looked to him for our upkeep in the foreseeable future, whereas he at last decided we was demons and only waiting for dark to steal the wits from his head; and while riding along he muttered prayers and incantations to bring us bad medicine, but so ran his luck that he never saw any of the animal brothers that assisted his magic-such as Rattlesnake or Prairie Dog-but rather only Jackrabbit, who had a grudge against him of long standing because he once had kept a prairie fire off his camp by exhorting it to burn the hares’ home instead (this page).

Even Ralph Fielding Snell calls attention to this phenomenon, inviting his readers to consider a number of specific seeming inconsistencies in Jack’s narration, including the fact that while Jack’s own voice is often ungrammatical, his representation of Custer’s speech or of Indian discourse is always impeccable (this page-this page).

Berger’s game here is a complicated one: By having Snell point out the seemingly surprising flashes of sophistication in Jack’s narration, he alerts us to the possibility that the entire narrative is a hoax; however, by calling attention to this verbal phenomenon, Snell diverts our attention from the even more unlikely aspects of Jack’s voice. The interplay between editor Snell and narrator Crabb can only remind us of that between editor John Ray, Jr., and narrator Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s Lolita. But just as surely as Jack’s voice belongs to the chorus of recent voices announcing that literature is a delightful hoax, it belongs to the chorus of “historical” voices determined to tell the way the Old West actually “was,” quite different enterprises united only by the medium of language.

What is perhaps most interesting in Jack’s voice is its ability to transcend cultural issues in pursuit of larger truths. This ability to synthesize the vagaries of his experience into larger propositions about reality does not make Jack wise, as the pattern of his personal disasters starkly attests, but he persistently pursues the grail of understanding, even when at considerable personal cost. He mulls the ironies of frontier conflict and routinely plays devil’s advocate to some of the most dearly held received truths of western lore, matching the wondering charm, escaping the sentimentality, and surpassing the wisdom of Huck Finn, another of Jack’s literary forerunners.

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