A Confederate General from Big Sur: Analysis of Major Characters
"A Confederate General from Big Sur" is a narrative that explores the lives of a group of characters in the backdrop of California's natural landscape. Central to the story is Lee Mellon, a young, unemployed man who claims descent from a Confederate general. He embodies an existential rebel, navigating life through hedonism and amoral survival tactics, which often involve panhandling and stealing. His way of life is contrasted by Jesse, the narrator, who is introspective and passive, struggling with his own spiritual emptiness after a failed love affair.
The dynamic between these two men is enriched by the presence of key female characters: Elizabeth, a part-time prostitute with nurturing qualities, and Elaine, Jesse's lover, who embodies a sense of bourgeois alienation yet seeks connection through her relationships with Lee and Jesse. The group also includes Johnston Wade, a wealthy but unstable insurance executive, whose tumultuous journey reflects the dark side of affluence. Together, these characters navigate themes of rebellion, alienation, and the search for identity amidst their flawed pursuits and interpersonal relationships.
A Confederate General from Big Sur: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: Richard Brautigan
First published: 1964
Genre: Novel
Locale: San Francisco and Big Sur, California
Plot: Fantasy
Time: The 1960's
Lee Mellon, an unemployed, twenty-three-year-old iconoclast who claims to be a descendant of a Confederate general. Assertive, apolitical, unreflective, and hedonistic, Lee is an existential rebel, a “rebel without a cause,” who pursues independence and pleasure with the energetic determination of a military campaign. Amoral and self-centered, Lee manages to survive by panhandling, stealing, extorting, and generally taking advantage of the people he meets. Because none of these techniques is very successful, Lee often must rely on his considerable ability to endure material deprivations. After spending a depressing year in an abandoned house in Oakland, a period in which his only triumph is tapping into the local utility's gas line, Lee travels to Big Sur, where he camps out in some ill-built shacks on borrowed land. There he lives from day to day, battling the frogs that keep him awake at night, courting Elizabeth, and contending with Johnston Wade's neurotic antics.
Jesse, the novel's narrator and the chronicler of Lee Mellon's exploits. After a disappointing love affair with a girl named Cynthia, Jesse leaves San Francisco and joins Lee at Big Sur. A sensitive and passive opposite to Lee, Jesse describes himself as an unemployed minister. In the absence of a spiritual calling or a firm basis for belief, he retreats into an absurdist minimalism—represented by his careful enumeration of the punctuation marks in Ecclesiastes—and a fatalistic acceptance of the world as he finds it. Jesse meets Elaine in a Monterey saloon, and she returns with him to Big Sur. Their affair eases Jesse's lingering sorrow over Cynthia, but it does nothing to fill his spiritual emptiness. His growing passivity and alienation threaten to develop into emotional paralysis, as his sexual impotence suggests.
Elizabeth, a part-time prostitute and Lee's sometime companion at Big Sur. She is an idealized combination of whore and mother who works as a highly skilled and highly paid Los Angeles prostitute for three months out of the year, then returns to her modest house at Big Sur, where she rears her children as vegetarians and refuses to kill even the rattlesnakes.
Elaine, an intelligent and attractive young woman who meets Jesse in a Monterey saloon and becomes his lover. A product of a middle-class background, Elaine is an example of bourgeois alienation. Attracted to the unconventionality of Jesse and Lee, Elaine buys them supplies and drives them back to their Big Sur encampment. There she enjoys the rebellious pleasures of marijuana and sex.
Johnston Wade, a rich, unstable insurance executive whom Lee dubs “Roy Earle” after the Humphrey Bogart character in the film High Sierra. Johnston arrives at the Big Sur encampment driving a new Bentley, in hysterical flight from his upper-middle-class family. He carries a briefcase containing $100,000. An exaggerated vision of the destructive power of money, Johnston spends a night chained to a log by Lee. By the next day, he has regained his composure, if not his sanity, and he leaves to return to his business and family.