The Measure of Little Big Man

THE MEASURE OF LITTLE BIG MAN Brooks Landon* Had Thomas Berger never written anything other than Little Big Man (1964), 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 been at least implicitly acknowledged by some two dozen scholarly studies and uninterrupted popular sales in the twenty-five 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 dialec­ tic: 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.”1 Surely Frederick Turner was correct when he concluded in his 1977 reassess­ ment that “few creative works of post-Civil War America have had as much of the fiber and blood of the national experience in them.”2 It now seems safe to predict that Little Big Man, the novel, will match its survival skills against those ofJack Crabb, its 111-year-old protagonist. And in some ways, Little Big Man must be acknowledged as Berger’s greatest novel—not necessarily his best, but the one in which he took on the sweeping matter of his American literary and mythological heritage and made a lasting con­ tribution to both. For all of its genius, however, this novel has proved itself a particular thorn in the side ofBerger scholarship; in the challenging canon of a novelist who never repeats himself, Little Big Man seems at once the most accessible and the most singular of Berger’s novels. Its historical subject matter has moved a number of readers to check Crabb’s narrative for accuracy, while its anthropological introduction to Cheyenne culture presents readers the opportunity to check for both accuracy and understanding. By invoking the figure of Custer and offering a version of America’s most fascinating military defeat, Berger’s novel risks assimilation into the cottage industry of Last Stand literature. And Jack Crabb has been compared both with Huck Finn and with the traditional figure of the picaro. *Brooks Landon is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa. He has published a book on Thomas Berger in the Twayne series and articles on him in Nation and Philological Quarterly as well as the introduction to the Dell edition of Little Big Man. What must not be overlooked is that each of these inviting (and fre­ quently rewarding) approaches to Berger’s third novel attempts to look into the novel by examining some other class of literature and that none of these approaches attempts to consider Little Big Man as a Thomas Berger novel, one sharing the vision and style of his other books. Noting this tendency, Berger once suggested that “the best readers of Little Big Man are persons who have no interest in the frontier, like the wife of my New York dentist, urban and Jewish.”3 Indeed, the most important challenge to the careful analysis of this brilliant captivity narrative is to free it from the restriction of narrow critical focus. Little Big Man deserves attention not just as a fine western or frontier novel but as an expansive refraction of American literary traditions ranging from pioneer to postmodern. As a critique of myth-making mechanisms, Berger’s novel offers a rigorous investigation of literary forms; as a complicated exploration of the concept of freedom, it expands the form ofthe captivity narrative through philosophical issues, ever a central concern of American fiction. The distinguishing aspect of Berger’s style as a novelist is a thorough­ going tendency toward dialectic and paratactic structures, and this novel indicates the multiple...