In the following essay, Horvath describes the efforts of the countercultural heroes in Brautigan 's fiction as they attempt to resist the dominant culture of American society, associated in Brautigan's novels with "dealing and desiring death. "

In the following essay, Horvath examines the ways in which Brautigan's fiction deals with the illusion of cheating death.

In the following essay, Hume analyzes the aesthetics of Brautigan's narratives, noting that he consciously used Zen principles to evoke a special kind of reader response.

In the following essay, Pietralunga compares Brautigan's Confederate General from Big Sur to some of the work of its Italian translator, finding biographical and literary similarities between the two writers.

In the following essay, Abbott discusses the critical neglect of Brautigan's work and attempts a reevaluation of his skill at dialogue and narrative.

In the following essay, Blakely analyzes the narrative technique in one Brautigan novel, asserting that Brautigan has more literary worth than many critics have admitted.

What intrigues us most about Richard Brautigan's novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur, is its strong resemblance to [Ernest Hemingway's] The Sun Also Rises and [F. Scott Fitzgerald's] The Great Gatsby, little as the comparison might be appreciated by the authors of those classic works. In narrative technique the novel most closely resembles Gatsby. Jesse, like Nick Carroway, is a first person peripheral narrator. The subject of his narration is a flamboyant, "romantic"...

The Brautigan phenomenon; California filtered through Brautigan, has been working itself out, in prose and verse, for several years now. How far has it got, and where is it going? Like the hitchhikers who stand beside Route 1 thumbing rides simultaneously in both directions, it is a distinctive phenomenon which is hard to assess…. We begin by distinguishing: on the one hand there is Brautigan's poetry, on the other Brautigan's prose. About the poetry, I can't pretend to offer a v...

In the following brief analysis of “Winter Rug,” Horvath discusses the manner in which the characters come to terms with death.

[Brautigan's writing seems to float easily away from the dreck of the contemporary environment] like clouds over the Pacific…. Although his work is indeed extremely funny, there is a pervasive sense of loss, desolation and death in it which amounts to an implicit formulation of an attitude towards contemporary America. The first word of his first novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur …, is 'attrition', and the book manages to combine fleeting reminiscences of the obvio...

Richard Brautigan is an epiphenomenon in American literature. He seems to represent some sort of insubstantial alternative. While the academy of letters reads Beckett, Borges, and Nabokov, the kids read Brautigan…. His appeal consists primarily in an irrepressible optimism (probably the brand of a woodsy Pacific Northwest background), a style flashing with artifice, and a total disregard for effete university culture. Mr. Brautigan is not himself the product of American higher education or of much fo...

Brautigan's work in both poetry and prose … provides a post-modernist instance of primitivist poetics in as pure a form as one could wish and also helps to clarify some of the differences between modernism and post-modernism in general. (p. 52) As a poet and maker of fiction, Brautigan seems to come as close to a painter like Grandma Moses as it is possible for a writer to do; though sometimes his allegorical intentions and utopian or pastoral politics suggest a greater affinity with the early...

"The Abortion," Richard Brautigan's new novel, is split almost evenly down the middle. Half of it is amiable fantasy, half realistic documentary so factual you can draw a map from its pages. It is possible to tie the two halves together symbolically or rather hang one half on the other. But that possibility depends more on the ingenuity of the commentator than on the merit of the work…. In spite of the fact that people come and go in this book and that part of it involves a journ...

[Richard Brautigan, in Trout Fishing in America, The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar] is funny but seldom satiric, sometimes bored but hardly ever angry, frequently happier than you but never holier than thou. One of his verses imagines "a cybernetic meadow/where mammals and computers/live together," a world of people "returned to our mammal/brothers and sisters,/and all watched over/by machines of loving grace"; and this gently witty reconciliat...

Richard Brautigan's novels have taken their place among the standard extra-curricular reading of college students. Their special appeal to the young may lie in Brautigan's capacity to make a myth that satisfies the demands of recent American experience, for he writes refreshing comedy that happens to accommodate a growing sense of disaster. A young man in his latest novel says, "I think we have the power to transform our lives into brand-new instantaneous rituals that we calmly act out ...

It strikes me that the secret of Richard Brautigan's fiction and poetry is that, like the symbolism of D. H. Lawrence, it means exactly what it seems to mean. Trying to delve deeply into it is like trying to delve deeply into a cigar box; what's in it may be good, bad or indifferent, but there really isn't very much of it and its pleasures are soon exhausted. It may be a sign of the times (or something) and it is certainly a symptom of the current state of American fiction that some cri...

Mr. Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster and In Watermelon Sugar are experimental pieces of quite spirited conception. (p. 158) Mr. Brautigan's solicitude for the world he lives in and his impatient grasp of essences continue from their clear emergence in this opening passage all the way through an inspired book. Trout Fishing in America is a person, a place, a quality; anything, in fact, the author surrealistically wants it to be. It funct...

Reading Mr. Brautigan's [Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt], I'm struck by the fact that [he] cannot be aspiring to poetdom as it is commonly conceived these days. Brautigan's poems suggest his presence as an imaginative, sensitive, and unexceptional observer. However, they neither explore his personality nor offer a reader anything else on a very deep or elaborate scale. The poetry is not tense, not particularly noble, not, seemingly, aspiring to anything other than the presentation of ...

Richard Brautigan's fiction shares many of the qualities of his poetry—charm, brevity, whimsy, and in many cases a total inability to leave a residue in the consciousness. His narrative voice, in its matter-of-factness, resembles that of that other Californian, [John] Steinbeck, but lacks the older writer's coherent philosophy and sense of apparent purpose. Yet even in these respects Brautigan's writing seems consistent with that of the more intellectual practitioners of experime...

[The guileless and unprepossessing Brautigan style] has finally, after a few tentative passes, collided firmly with the harsh and nasty seventies. Brautigan's sixth novel, "Willard and His Bowling Trophies," is essentially about sex and violence. Willard, in standard Brautigan fashion, really has very little to do with any of it. He is, in fact, a mysterious papier-mâché bird, housed off the lower floor of a two-unit apartment building, and surrounded by a collection of st...

When you take on the surreal you must clearly watch out for its near and merely embarrassing neighbours, triteness and banality. Richard Brautigan is not, on the whole, half watchful enough…. [The plot of The Hawkline Monster is one] that leaves one decidedly out of thrall much of the time. And as for Gothicism: as oddities, this lot scarcely packs much of a frisson. "What does supernatural mean?" Cameron asks. "It means out of the ordinary", one of the Misses Hawkline inf...

Willard and his Bowling Trophies is a humorous downtown fantasy and might strike someone not au fait with post-colonic literature as unusual, disgusting even. This is not so. Brautigan couldn't split an infinitive to save his life. In the manner in which he handles his God-given culture he could be the nearest America comes to producing an updated P. G. Wodehouse. But his originality, let alone longevity, has suffered from an overdose of small beer exacerbated by a material lack of concentration. The...

[Psychiatrists] doing a roaring trade in rich young ladies who've lost the will to live tip Richard as therapy in an each way double with Christina Rossetti…. [He's] currently heavily backed by pushers of brown sugar and watercress and nut omelettes—people so determined to achieve a more beautiful and profound vision of things they reconcile the implacable eating of 'natural' food with the swallowing, inhaling and injecting of various chemical concoctions? Indeed, h...

Though much has been made of [Brautigan's] years in the wilderness, it has fallen to him, as far as his poetry is concerned, to be the popularizer of other men's work. Somewhere in [The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster] you will find hidden the sweetened and simplified faces of Frank O'Hara, James Wright, Robert Creeley, Dudley Fitts, not to mention Buddy Holly, Walt Whitman and all. He is the author of two original and poetic prose works called In Watermelon Sugar and Trout Fis...

Richard Brautigan's beat-story A Confederate General from Big Sur—strikes me as very crude indeed. In it the beatnik tendency to disorganization of form and inconsequence of content reaches a new low. (p. 8) There is little to say of Richard Brautigan's A Confederate General from Big Sur except that it is no story at all but only a series of improvised scenes in the manner of Jack Kerouac. It is pop-writing of the worst kind, full of vapid jokes and equally vapid sex-scenes which are al...

As a newcomer to the Brautigan cult, I can only think that [Dreaming of Babylon] must be a bit of a spare-time exercise: an after-dinner conversational joke which got out of hand…. Much of the action takes place in the morgue, the cemetery, or the hero's head; either way, the effect is fairly deadly. Brautigan's style depends on the premise that one bad joke deserves another: he sets up what starts off as a respectable one-liner and then kills it stone dead by trying to make it into two...

Brautigan insists that [June 30th, June 30th] is a "different" collection of poetry. Written in diary form, it contains impressions of his seven-week tour of Japan in 1976…. Taken individually, many of these poems do not hold up well. Brautigan himself concedes that the collection is "uneven." Taken together, it portrays a mood of alienation and loneliness, as might be expected when a poet finds himself immersed in an alien culture, unable to communicate with, or be unders...

[June 30th, June 30th is a] collection of eighty brief poems, several just fragments—written from May 13 to June 30th on a visit Brautigan made to Japan, somewhat in the spirit of a memorial journey for the Japanese and American war dead…. Like so many literary journeys, it becomes a point of departure for an exploration of the self in relation to the world of the nonself. The Brautigan wit is fleetingly present, but there is a haunting feeling of loneliness in the poetry—a sense of a s...

[The Galilee Hitch-Hiker] has nine short poems which take their shape from quotations from Baudelaire, and from the kind of residue in the reader's mind concerning his recollection of Baudelaire's life—or what we take his life to have been, relying on his poems. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. The perfect poem is the second one, The American Hotel …—which is really a kind of comic genius. It might be useful to note that these poems have a sense of �...

As a Barthelme-like exercise in discontinuous modes, lyrical, topical, and confessional, [Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel] is amusing but somehow self-cancelling. The parable about mindless public violence is too harmlessly droll, the love story too sentimental, the portrait of the artist too routinely self-loathing. Remembering Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, I would be glad to like Sombrero Fallout better, but his charm seems to be increasingly calculated. (p. 100) Thomas R. E...