Regeneration through Violence: Echoes of the Myth of the West in Jim Harrison’s A Good Day to Die

Abstract

This essay analyzes some of the reverberations of the myth of the West present in Jim Harrison’s early novel A Good Day to Die (1973), where the myth is put to the test of compatibility with the real world. Richard Slotkin’s notion of regeneration through violence as well as Jane Tompkins’s observations regarding depictions of masculinity in 20th century popular westerns find affirmation in the novel’s narrative. Despite the  contemporaneous concern for increasing technology-aided control of nature, evident in other novels, it is remarkable how A Good Day to Die recreates many of the aspects of the myth of the West. Arguably, the novel simultaneously proposes that the kind of perspective that Donna Haraway terms “situated knowledges” in the end allows the unnamed narrator to maintain a more realistic connection with reality than what the myth offers.