[Little Big Man] 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." In other words, Berger's novel is an attempt to explore that mythic experience from the viewpoint of the twentieth century American, intellectual and sensitive, wishing to discover unity, and yet almost desperately aware of division. And so, as with most American novelists, the meanings Berger finds are ambiguous, ironic, inevitably multiple.
It is out of his desire to explore the myth, and yet not to become the sentimental victim of it, that Berger, I suggest, chose his form, i.e., the picaresque; and it is the eminent suitability of form to themes that makes the novel successful, a neat complexity of idea and story. It is the picaresque's tone and shape that allow the novelist to be in the experience and still observe it from the outside; for, although the picaresque is at bottom realistic, it does make room for the extraordinary, for symbolic comment. And too, the picaresque, with its wide range of action and of society, is another way of making a microcosm…. (pp. 35-6)
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