The Spectator Bird

Content Warning: This section contains references to suicide, rape, incest, and eugenics.

“As for Joe Allston, he has been a wisecracking fellow traveler in the lives of other people, and a tourist in his own.”

Joe Allston once aspired to be a successful author, like the ones he managed in his decades-long career as a literary agent. Now retired, he looks back ruefully on the Faustian bargain he made in the “bottom of the Great Depression” to “be a talent broker [rather than] a broke talent” (4). Instead of creating lasting, meaningful works of his own, he has spent his productive years schmoozing with publishers and writers, some of whom get by on less talent than he once showed. As a result, he fears that he has wasted his life and his talent and will leave behind no lasting monument. His use of the third person in this passage foregrounds the disconnectedness he feels from his own life, which seems so insubstantial and arbitrary that he sometimes feels as if his “whole life happened to somebody else” (75). Through Joe’s reflections on his career, Stegner introduces the theme of Choice and the Inevitability of Regret.

“He has always been hungry for some continuity and assurance and sense of belonging, but has never had ancestors or descendants or place in the world.”

Joe has no surviving children, and his ancestry is a mystery to him: He knows very little about his parents and nothing about their family lines. Most Americans, he feels, suffer from a sense of “deracination” or rootlessness; they lack the continuity and stability of living in an ancient place rich with the history and culture of their bloodlines over many generations.