Trout Fishing in America

In Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, there are recurring ideas of things that are lost, ignored, or destroyed.

Trout Fishing in America Shorty is a good example of this, as shown when the narrator says, “I remember Trout Fishing in America Shorty passed out in Washington Square, right in front of the Benjamin Franklin statue. He had fallen face first out of his wheel chair and just lay there without moving. Snoring loudly,” (46). No one apparently cares that this paraplegic man is passed out on the lawn, fallen from his wheelchair. The narrator mentions this with such an offhand tone, as if it is completely normal that this sort of thing would happen. The narrator even remarks later on that, while his daughter is at first fascinated with this man, “The sandbox suddenly looked better to her than Trout Fishing in America Shorty. She didn’t care about his sausages anymore either. She decided to take advantage of the green light, and she crossed over to the sandbox. Trout Fishing in America Shorty stared after her as if the space between them were a river growing larger and larger” (97). I feel that this sentence also represents the gap between the old and young: that the younger generations are losing touch and interest in those things that came before them, while the older generations can only watch as they plow forward at the first sight of "a green light."

The narrator's child again comes up along the lines of this topic when, while at a lake, she “caught one of the fish with her hand and looked at it for a while. . . . Then she grew tired of this. She tipped the pan over and a dozen fish flopped out onto the shore” (65). The fish eventually get put back into the pan so they don't die, but, as a mere baby, the fact that this could end their lives didn't enter her mind. Even the narrator doesn't seem to mind too much about these fish, as he and "the woman" simply "watched the baby to make sure she was just leaning on them a little. We didn't want her to kill any of them because she was too young" (65). They don't care if the fish do die-- after all, the narrator is an avid trout fisher--but only want the baby to not kill them because of her youth and "innocence." Interesting that this innocence is also what would cause her to almost "innocently" kill those same fish.

The narrator, too, gets ignored, when trying to hitchhike along the road: “It was all very simple. No one would stop and pick me up even though I was carrying fishing tackle. People usually stop and pick up a fisherman. I had to wait three hours for a ride” (6). Nowadays, people are more likely to be surprised by someone picking up a hitchhiker than by one not getting picked up, which is, I think, hinted at in these few sentences. How many people see a hitchhiker along the highway, look at him (or her), and then keep driving, utterly ignoring him/her? (I mean, I do it all the time... hitchhikers are "scary" by public opinion, now). There was a time when it wasn't considered a threat to your life to pick up a stranger in your car, but in this novel, no one would even pick up the little boy with fishing tackle.

The “Worsewick Hot Springs” that the narrator and “the woman” go to, too, seems to be one of these ignored, destroyed places. There “was a green slime growing around the edges of the tub and there were dozens of dead fish floating in our bath.” (43) Talk about creepy. This "green slime" and the "dead fish" signify a lack of maintenance at these "hot springs," yet the narrator and the woman don't seem to mind (they also have quite an uncanny knack for finding these forgotten, ignored places), even going as far to have sex in the disgusting, murky "spring" while dead fish float all around them. They don't mind the hoards of fish, somehow, even though I think most people would vomit just at the thought of such a sight. They are able to find some weird sort of beauty in this space, even though it probably hasn't been touched in yeards.

One last thought on things being ignored: the narrator writes that “old Italians gather in front of the newspaper in the afternoon and just stand there, leaning up against the building, talking and dying in the sun” (45). Most of the things I've mentioned being ignored are older things, things that are obsolete, or just not "progressive." The sorts of things that get in the way of "going through the green light" in order to get along with one's life, or things like how slowing down to pick up a hitchhiker would take too much time from your schedule (or might get you killed, whatever). I think that one thread in Brautigan's extremely layered and intensely thematically deep novel is this notion of ignored spaces, ideas, or things, especially those that are older, in a time where "modern-ness" is considered to be of the utmost importance.