God or Ogre?
Abbey’s greatest use of metaphor is when he is describing the indescribable sights of the desert. One of his particular talents is description that splits in two directions, offering potential choices for deeper emotional resonance. Such as:
“a balanced rock about fifty feet high, mounted on a pedestal of equal height; it looks like a heat from Easter Island; a stone god or petrified ogre.”
"Its name is Progress."
The untamed and unplanned beauty of the natural wonders that inspire Abbey are overhung with an approaching storm. A significant theme of the book is the threat which the wilderness of the West faces and it is not a natural threat. The author describes this threat as a cloud and it is man’s desire to progress without letting anything stand in his way.
“For there is a cloud on my horizon. A small dark cloud no bigger than my hand.”
The Assumption of the Virgin Mary
Abbey comes to the defense of the Mormons he encounters to a certain extent. Although admitting their politics is questionable, he suggests that their religious dogma is no more dubious than the tenets upon which other faiths are placed such as the Catholic Church’s doctrine of the Assumption which he describes as the Virgin Mary being “launched on a flat trajectory into outer space, like a shot off a shovel, without even a crash helmet or pressure suit.”
Politics
The text has a definite political context. This is not merely the story of a man going off into the wilderness to become one with nature. In defending the wild against the excesses of progress, Abbey even goes to the length to the suggest that preservation of the country’s vast untamed frontier might one day benefit as a bastion against the forces of tyranny. Because:
“The city which should be the symbol and center of civilization, can also be made to function as a concentration camp.”
Poetry
At then at other times, Abbey lets go of the prosaic and reaches for the poetic with his metaphorically rich narrative:
“Wilderness. The word itself is music.”
