Opening Line
The novel opens with a nicely constructed paragraph full of figurative language serving the purpose of establishing imagery that immediately situates the reader completely and fully within the world in which the narrative unfolds:
“At sunset hour the forest was still, lonely, sweet with tang of fir and spruce, blazing in gold and red and green; and the man who glided on under the great trees seemed to blend with the colors and, disappearing, to have become a part of the wild woodland.”
The Bad Guy
Metaphorical language is engaged to quickly delineate a physical description of the bad guy. The description is short on details, but is enough to allow the reader of any western to fill in the missing details because it is almost an iconic description capable of fitting the bad guy in any number of westerns. Of course, keep in mind that Grey wrote this before it had become a stereotype; he helped to create the stereotype:
“He had a black, drooping mustache, and a chin like a rock. A potential force, matured and powerful, seemed to be wrapped in his movements.”
But What Kind of Man is He?
The bad guy is now easily pictured. But what kind of bad is he? What’s his deal? He’s a powerful physical force with that granite chin beneath a dark mustache, but does the inside match the outside? According to at least one character, it seems that the villain here is a contradiction somewhat, at least according to the basic rules of western villains:
“Beasley's thick-headed, an' powerful conceited. Vain as a peacock!”
The West
Throughout the novel, the author peppers the text with prose highly metaphorical in suggestion that the West is something tangible and alive and even possessing a sort of sentience. Grey uses language to transform time and space into an entity that controls and even judges:
“The West was beautiful, but hard.
That was where the West spoke…All of which was to say that as the wildness of the West had made possible his crimes, so it now held him responsible for them.
Beasley thus heard the West speak out of the mouth of his own man.”
“you are as dense as the forest where you live”
Milt Dale is the titular man of the forest. By the end, the reader discovers—as his lady love teasingly puts it—that he can be called a man of the forest just as much for how he lives as where he lives.
