“Dead Man at Grandview Point” is the essay about a human life, death, and the role of nature in these two events. In this chapter, the Abbey’s goal is not to clarify the reasons of death, but to explain that death is something all people have to accept one day, and the way the tourist at Grandview Point meets death seems to be one of the most fascinating and scariest options.
The chronology of the events in “The Dead Man at Grandview Point” is simple but informative indeed. Abbey does not want to depart from traditions and begins the essay with demonstrating a certain respect for nature and its possibility to determine a person’s mood. The author pays a certain attention to the descriptions: people’s behavior and their intentions to creep in and out and cope with the routines, changes in weather conditions, and the continuity of the events. To underline the connection between people and nature, Abbey makes use of figurative language such as the word “somnolence” that could be attached to people and nature or “petrified silence” that could be the sign of something good or bad in the air. In my opinion, the ultimate aim of the story is to underline the importance of the connection that exists between nature and people. The author is successful in reaching this goal because he chooses to describe this relation in terms of two crucial extremes that can be controlled by neither nature nor a human. A human life and a human death are the extremes people can never understand.
They come to this world and could leave it anytime. It is impossible to predict the way or the conditions under which a person dies. Still, Abbey wants to provide the reader with hope that some decisions could still be made to underline the power of human nature. People, who are in good relations with nature, are free to observe and choose the places they want to die at. The tourist from the Grandview Point was a photographer, who made pictures of the surroundings. He, as no one else, could observe the whims of nature and accept them as they were. According to the author, he died in a good way and under the conditions that describe the relations of a human and nature in a perfect way. The author’s envy to the manner of the photograph’s dying seems to be the best expression of respect for nature and human dependence on it.
Edward Abbey is one of the authors, who could help the reader to accept the real-life facts in the best possible way. His Dead Man at Grandview Point is the story of life and death, the only two things a person or any other living being could never avoid. This chapter is the collection of the ideas about the relations between people and nature. Though these relations are not always perfect, Abbey tries to underline the essence of such relations and the inevitability to escape from them.