Self, Salvation, and Story: Writing Rescues on Glenora Peak and the Taylor Glacier

• Main Author: Branch, Michael
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: Scholarly Commons 1996
• Subjects: History; Glenora; Taylor Glacier; glacier; Alaska
• Online Access: https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/muir-symposium/1996/events/10

This paper examines John Muir's construction and presentation of self in two narratives of perilous climbing adventures in Alaska. The author compares Alaska missionary Hall Young's romantic image of Muir as a heroic mountaineer with the self-effacing persona of Muir's own books and with the decentered or "transparent" style of Muir's mountaineering narratives. Muir's willingness to celebrate his own prowess as a mountaineer was always predicated upon making nature--in the form of a wild sheep, a flower, a glacier, or a dog--the "hero" of his story. Although Muir became the romantic hero of Hall Young's Alaska stories, his own work projects the romantic sensibility onto the landscape, thereby decentering the human subject.