ABSTRACT
McCarthy’s first novel is a product of the 1960s. e growth of affluence and rapid technological change that followed the end of the Second World War produced cultural, social and political change in all the industrialized societies of the West. e culture of that decade continued to be influenced by the modernist notion that art needed to find new forms in order to express new insights regarding human beings and their world. e French film director Jean Luc Godard, a leading figure of the nouvelle vague, spoke quite seriously when he informed the world that a film should have “a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.” Reading The Orchard Keeper one gains the impression that for McCarthy, what was true for film was also true for the novel. e action of the first page of the text is in a place and time that only becomes apparent on the very last page. Both sections of text belong in time to the end of the story. I have mentioned already the Faulknerian aspect of this theme of “the past in the present”. I have also suggested the powerful and continuing influence of Eliot in McCarthy’s work. In this case we are confronted with a key theme from The Four Quartets:
Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present.¹
Matthew Guinn writes:
Modernist narrative technique shapes the intertwined stories of Arthur (sic) Ownby, John Wesley Rattner, and Marion Sylder, providing an epistemological structure of fragmented viewpoints by which the plot is pieced together.²
Only at the conclusion of the tale do we discover that John Wesley Rattner has been “present” in the text from the very beginning and that he occupies the same relation to the story, in time and place, as the narrator. As mentioned in the section on Wake For Susan, Dianne Luce suggests that we may identify The Orchard Keeper as John Wesley’s story and that in a sense he may be considered its narrator. However it would be an exaggeration to claim that Luce puts forward this idea in as definite a manner as this. John Wesley is like Wes in that he finds inspiration for his thoughts in a graveyard but his relation to the narrative voice is less clear cut than in Wes’s case (whose own position was not without its complexity). As previously stated, Luce correctly identifies the narrative voice as “ambiguous.”³ It is clear that much of the prose of The Orchard Keeper could not have emanated from John Wesley. Indeed the Tennessee mountain boy can only be the narrator of the text if he is, like Wes, read as a surrogate for McCarthy himself. at we should so read him is entirely consistent, both with the structure of the novel, the precedent of Wake For Susan, and what we know about McCarthy’s own boyhood in East Tennessee.
