Sammendrag
John Williams’s novel Butcher’s Crossing, originally published in 1960 to little acclaim but reintroduced to the literary market following the recent rediscovery of his authorship, tells the story of a young man who ventures out into the wilderness of the American West in search of himself. Via a combination of Bildungsroman genre theory and ecocriticism, this thesis reads Butcher’s Crossing as an ecocritical Bildungsroman in order to examine how the formative process of Will Andrews, the protagonist of the novel, relates to the relationship between human and nature, is influenced by cultural perspectives of this relationship, and discloses anxieties regarding this relationship. The thesis examines the main aspects of Will’s formation, namely his journey, his apprenticeship, and the influence of secondary characters, in conjunction with theories of dualism, ecofeminism, and ecophobia, as well as influences from the concept of wilderness and New England Transcendentalism. Ultimately, the thesis argues that the Bildungsroman narrative of Butcher’s Crossing illustrates not only how Will’s formative process is influenced by cultural perspectives of the human-nature relationship, but also how the image of human separation and mastery produced by these perspectives are challenged by Will’s experiences with the natural world.