The dissolution of identity and selfhood

The dissolution of identity and selfhood is a recurring disturbance in William Andrews’s passage through the wilderness: the forest seems to absorb distinctions between people and their surroundings, while the sight of a slaughtered bison makes him confront a more intimate loss. The animal’s reduction from a living, self-possessed creature to inert meat becomes inseparable from his sense that something in himself has been damaged.

The forest and the loss of distinction

As William Andrews rides toward the pine forest with Miller and Schneider, the world seems to lose its ordinary separations. The horses’ breathing and hoofbeats, like the men’s few words, are swallowed by the forest’s silence. Sounds reach Andrews muted and distant; a human voice and a horse’s snort seem alike, reduced to soft thuds that appear to come from the forest itself. The scene does not merely place him in an unfamiliar landscape: it unsettles the boundary between the men and the place they enter, as if their presence has been taken up into a larger, impersonal life.

That absorption anticipates a more violent disturbance in Andrews’s understanding of selfhood. Remembering his flight from Francine in Butcher’s Crossing alongside his flight from a butchered bison in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, he recognizes that disgust at blood and entrails does not fully explain his reaction. What shook him was the transformation of a creature that had seemed proud and alive into exposed, powerless flesh. In his perception, the carcass was no longer itself—or no longer the creature it had imagined itself to be. Its identity had been killed; the sight also confronted Andrews with a destruction within himself that he could not face.

Touch, Memory, and Place

In the darkness, Andrews’s hand emerges from beneath the blankets and moves across his face: over the cold, rough rise of his brow, along his nose, across his cracked lips, and through his thick beard. The gesture is at once tactile and searching. After the carcass has made the loss of an animal’s identity unbearable to him, he feels for the features by which his own body can be recognized. He falls asleep with his hand still against his face, unable to turn that uncertainty into an answer.

The valley then becomes more than the setting of the hunt: it begins to supply Andrews with a sense of where he exists. As the herd dwindles, he measures time by its remaining animals rather than by the passing days, and the country beyond the high, enclosed plateau slips from memory. The route over the mountain, the thirsty plains, and Butcher’s Crossing return only in fragments, like a dream. Looking down on the valley, with its yellow-green floor, pine-covered mountain walls, red and gold aspen crowns, scattered rises and rocks beneath an immense blue sky, Andrews feels that his gaze gives the place its contours and that his existence receives form and location from it in return. He cannot imagine himself elsewhere. This attachment offers a provisional orientation, but it is founded on the same estrangement that has unsettled his identity: the outside world has not been reconciled with the self, only lost from view.

The self absorbed into the hunt

The valley’s dead do not remain a single shocking sight. As the slaughter continues, Andrews sees naked bison carcasses spread across the ground, their rancid odor so familiar that he scarcely notices it; the survivors graze among the bodies over grass stained with dried blood. His accommodation to this landscape marks a change in what he can take in without recoil. Yet the diminishing herd also reveals how thoroughly the hunt’s purpose has entered his sense of time: he has not imagined its complete destruction, but knows that Miller will not leave while even one bison remains alive. The scale of the killing makes that certainty concrete. A herd once numbering five thousand has fallen below three hundred, and Miller now circles the survivors slowly, killing at most a dozen or fourteen at a time. Andrews’s awareness is thus caught between the carcasses he has learned to endure and the finality he has only now begun to recognize. The selfhood unsettled by the butchered animal is not restored by life in the valley; it is increasingly measured within a world organized around the herd’s disappearance.

Selfhood under the pressure of violence

Andrews’s crisis turns on a distinction between bodily survival and the continuity of a self. The bison remains physically present after the killing, but to Andrews its former identity—the creature it had seemed to be—is gone with its life. The carcass is therefore not merely an image of death; it exposes how violently an outward observer can reduce a living being to an object, and how such reduction can unsettle the observer as well. Andrews cannot face what the animal’s destruction awakens in him, and his flight registers that failure before he can explain it.

The brief search of his own face by touch sets this shock against a need for physical recognition. His hand traces familiar features, but the gesture offers contact rather than resolution: he falls asleep still holding his face. Later, the valley seems to give his existence form and location, even as the world beyond it fades from memory. Taken together, these moments make selfhood precarious and relational in the novel: Andrews locates himself first through the body he can feel, then through a landscape whose contours seem to answer his gaze. Neither form of orientation erases the destruction he has recognized in the bison; the valley’s apparent shelter remains bound to a hunt that is steadily eliminating the lives around him.