SOURCE: Slovic, Scott. “Aestheticism and Awareness: The Psychology of Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang.” The CEA Critic 55, no. 3 (spring-summer 1993): 54-68.

In the following essay, Slovic finds the search for self-awareness to be the main theme of The Monkey Wrench Gang.

[W]ith five published novels and three volumes, including this one, of personal history to my credit—or discredit if you prefer—why am I still classified by librarians and tagged by reviewers as a “nature writer”?

—Edward Abbey, Abbey's Road

Wilderness is above all an opportunity to heighten one's awareness, to locate the self against the nonself. It is a springboard for introspection. And the greatest words, those which illumine life as it is centrally lived and felt, intensify that process.

—Bruce Berger, The Telling Distance: Conversations with the American Desert

I. “a Voice Crying in the Wilderness, for the Wilderness”?

Sharon Cameron has suggested that...