Travel Essays · Chapter
The Plains of Nebraska explained
The narrator describes the vast, featureless plains of Nebraska, comparing the landscape to a billiard-board and reflecting on the monotony and isolation experienced by settlers.
What happens
The narrator describes the vast, featureless plains of Nebraska, comparing the landscape to a billiard-board and reflecting on the monotony and isolation experienced by settlers. He observes a contented milk-selling woman at a way station and recounts a rude encounter at North Platte, highlighting the incomplete civilization of the region.
Themes in this chapter
Nature and the Sublime
The vast, empty plains evoke a sense of the sublime, with the horizon and sky dominating the landscape, both exhilarating and oppressive.
Freedom vs. Confinement
The open plains offer a sense of freedom but also confinement through monotony and isolation, as the settler is trapped in a 'huge sameness.'
Characters to notice
- The Americans
The narrator observes a well-dressed man who rudely refuses to pass the milk-jug, exemplifying incomplete civilization.
Key passages
“It was a world almost without a feature; an empty sky, an empty earth; front and back, the line of railway stretched from horizon to horizon, like a cue across a billiard-board.”
The landscape was featureless, with the railway line extending straight across the flat plain like a cue on a billiard table.
The narrator emphasizes the stark emptiness and artificiality of the plains.
“She sold milk with patriarchal grace. There was not a line in her countenance, not a note in her soft and sleepy voice, but spoke of an entire contentment with her life.”
She sold milk with a dignified, almost maternal ease, and her face and voice expressed complete satisfaction with her life.
The narrator admires the milk-seller's contentment despite her bleak surroundings.