“The Mountain Man and American Anguish”

The mountain man who people believed to be from America, was expected to be brave and possess instincts that make him powerful. Psychological reasons made this man act entirely opposite to his nature. The mountain man had a different life. He had always been isolated and in a state of self victimization. He had dark qualities, which people considered to be damnable and rarely accepted by the public. This happens because the psychological state of the historical mountain man and his counterpart in American culture has not been studied. The writer sees the mountain man as a man full of violence and brutality. He categorizes him to be a close relative of animal species and considers him to have bestial violence.

The author uses social-cultural critics and archetypal critics where he binds them with the psychology of scapegoating which Jungian analyst and scholar Sylvia Perera developed. He uses the shadow, which he perceives as “the image one does not want to be” (McCarthy, 1997), the mountain man usually have qualities to keep in mind. The mountain man lives hell of a life, he is always in exile, mostly in west America. The mountain man who the author refers to as a televised trapper is always searching for a home base which he never finds. This means that the televised trapper is condemned in the wilderness; which is the cursed area of west America.

The author sees this as the modern world, where he associates the trapper with the Vietnam combat soldiers. He gives an example with Jerome Courtland who played a part as a mountain man. This was in the Walt Disney Company six-part series which was televised between 1957, and 1958. The televised trapper was swiped of television in the late 1950s and did not feature again until 1970. The cold war culture had released and shown the televised trapper pressured. He did not give in to the threats of the anti-communists, to rule of law and an open community. The Vietnam War made him move to America where he stayed throughout 1960s.

McCarthy uses Kelly as another example. This hero featured in The Oregon Trail (1976), which outlays other difficulties of the trapper. He is a mountain man, a thief who plots a move to the west. Upon return, Thorpe the wagon master (Rod Taylor) knocked him down. He responds by saying that a mountain man always gets off by himself whenever he found himself crowded by humanity. The American audience demanded total capturing of the west and control of everything including the mountains.

The article relates the mountain man to the world. The mountain man represents the Vietnam wars while the west America represents the world. Just as the west Americans hated and discriminated the televised trapper, the trapper retaliated by causing problems for them. This earned the society the tag cursed (Patrick 1997). The current world usually discriminates the Vietnam who people considered as evil. They end up retaliating and standing their selves out. In order to reduce the amount of war in the current world, we must accept the Vietnam and love them. They should feel accepted by society, hence no fights again.

The weak part of the article is that the author uses a lot of people’s names. He does this to the extent of using peoples name in a whole paragraph making it hard for comprehension. Some of the English terms that he uses to make it hard for people to understand clearly the overall meaning of the sentence. It can be said that the author uses four or five types of vocabulary in a single sentence. Some of the structure formations in sentences are not standard due to the big and long words used.