SOURCE: Walker, Elinor Ann. “Redeeming Loneliness in Richard Ford's ‘Great Falls’ and Wildlife.” In Perspectives on Richard Ford, edited by Huey Guagliardo, pp. 121-39. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000.

In the following essay, Walker offers a Sartrean analysis of the story “Great Falls” and the novel Wildlife.

Several of Richard Ford's works are classic coming-of-age tales in which a teenage boy must witness a parental failure, experience sexual desire and disappointment, pose questions that have no obvious answers, and, like William Faulkner's Sarty or the narrator of James Joyce's “Araby,” choose justice over kin or feel his eyes burn with anguish and shame. Ford's male narrators in the short story “Great Falls” (included in Rock Springs [1987]) and the novel Wildlife (1990) experience loneliness that accompanies self-knowledge gained despite, or perhaps because of, the inscrutableness of others. Although Ford leaves his narrators in isolation at each narrative's end, he reveals...