ABSTRACT
Richard Brautigan’s rejection of fixed forms is the lasting concern of his three early novels, but there can be little doubt that the text which most clearly invites the reader to share in his literary reflexiveness is Trout Fishing in America. Brautigan’s images can ‘take hold’ and ‘catch on’, become part of the very dynamic of the narrative itself, so enfranchising his text from discursive necessities and generating free creation on the narrative margins. Brautigan’s methods of simple linkage from sentence to sentence can be displayed in the movement from simile to metaphor in the example of the grocer’s red birthmark. Brautigan’s ‘recipes’ may be based on foods and condiments ready for imaginative consumption; they may be founded on elements of hardware ingeniously reassembled to make a verbal ‘lure’; they may, like Kool-Aid, be con-cocted to serve each individual’s own need for illumination.
