Nothingness and emptiness

Nothingness and emptiness in the novel are not simply an abstract absence: they are the possibility that the ambitions and stories by which people organize their lives will leave no lasting meaning or reward. J.D. McDonald gives this possibility its most direct expression in a bleak conversation with William Andrews. Andrews cannot refute him, and later sees the same emptiness recurring in the faces, losses, and abandoned hopes of the expedition. By the end, the idea has become less a claim to debate than a pattern through which Andrews understands what has happened and chooses to leave.

McDonald’s account of a life built on lies

McDonald describes life as a succession of deceptions: people are raised on falsehoods, taught more polished versions at school, and continue living by them. Only near death, he suggests, might a person recognize that there was nothing beyond the self and what that person might have done. The discovery comes too late to act on. In his account, the dream of conquering the world is itself another deception, sustained by the belief that one possesses a secret others have missed. The void is therefore not only the absence of achievement; it is the collapse of the stories that made achievement seem capable of completing a life.

He makes that argument concrete through the expedition. Nearly a year spent pursuing a dream has yielded, in his reckoning, no usable return: thousands of bison killed, hides left to rot, a destroyed wagon, calluses, and the memory of a dead man. The contrast between the labor and the aftermath gives his words their force. The hides were carefully packed, yet will decay where they were abandoned; even the wagon, once essential to the expedition, may serve beavers as a dam. Work and possession do not secure permanence. The things that remain are reduced to incidental traces and loss.

Andrews’s resistance and silence

Andrews answers McDonald with repeated denials, insisting that this cannot be all and that something more must remain. Yet when McDonald asks what that might be, Andrews falls silent. The exchange does not establish McDonald’s verdict as an indisputable truth; it shows that Andrews cannot yet supply an answer capable of opposing it. His response is emotional before it is reasoned: a vague terror rises in him, but fear does not restore the meaning he is trying to defend.

McDonald tests the idea against the people Andrews knows. Miller understood the country better than anyone and pursued his own dream, but McDonald asks what that knowledge accomplished. Charley Hoge had his Bible and whiskey, yet those did not make the winter bearable or save the hides. Fred Schneider’s name remains, McDonald says, but only to the survivors; Schneider himself has nothing left. These examples make emptiness unevenly visible: a failed undertaking, inadequate consolations, and finally the difference between being remembered and being able to experience remembrance. The conversation brings the expedition’s distinct losses into a single, unsettling question about what can survive them.

McDonald’s self-judgment and departure

McDonald does not speak as an untouched observer. He admits that he too has been left with nothing because he forgot what he had learned long ago and let the lies take hold again. His dream differed from Andrews’s and Miller’s, but he had mistaken that difference for proof that it was not a dream. His speech thus implicates the speaker as well as the listener: the man diagnosing the failure of dreams acknowledges that his own life was governed by one.

He says he will follow Miller’s advice and leave the country, considering Saint Louis, Boston, or even New York. He describes the place he is leaving as too large and empty, and as one that fills a person with lies; success, in his view, requires escape and an end to dreaming. His proposed alternative is to take what comes when it comes. This is not presented as a triumphant discovery of a new purpose. It is a decision made after the collapse of his earlier expectations, and its matter-of-fact tone sits uneasily beside the sweeping despair that led to it.

The void as a pattern of remembered images

Later, Andrews recognizes McDonald’s nothingness not as a single proposition but as something that has appeared in scenes throughout the expedition. He recalls the hollow, melancholy look in Charley Hoge’s eyes; Fred Schneider’s contemptuous look toward the river just before a horse’s hoof erased the expression from his face; and Miller’s blind determination before the mountain blizzard. He also remembers the light in Charley Hoge’s eyes when he left the fire to follow Miller into the night, and McDonald’s despair as he pursued Miller amid the burning hides. These images do not all mean the same thing: emptiness appears as vacancy, resolve, a last expression, or grief. Their accumulation nevertheless makes it feel like the expedition’s recurring condition rather than one man’s theory.

The final image in Andrews’s recollection is Francine asleep, motionless on her pillow. He can barely remember the passion that brought him to her, just as he can scarcely remember the passion that drove him across the continent in search of a definitive identity. He now recognizes the vanity behind both pursuits. That recognition does not produce a replacement dream. He takes two banknotes, leaves the rest for Francine, pays the stableman, and rides out of Butcher’s Crossing before dawn without waking her. His practical arrangements distinguish the departure from simple disappearance, while his refusal to return with McDonald to the city of his birth closes off the earlier hope that either civilization or wilderness would give him a final form. As the village itself appears destined to be dismantled or reclaimed by grass, the ending leaves Andrews moving on without claiming that movement has filled the void.