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Show 555. from the structure of the book alone. After choosing to make First Summer dramatize his own baptism into the Sierran wilderness, he developed a context for the drama. By juxtaposing the journal entries of the young Muir with certain incidents, he could remind the reader of the social pressures which had surrounded this pilgrimage. After all, the old Muir was not only selecting and editing the journals, but also deciding upon their sequence. So the structure of First Summer allowed a young naturalist and an older creator of Parks to speak. The young narrator could travel his own innocent and sometimes heedless ways, while the older and wiser man constructed the bleak social context of the book. If young Muir was primarily interested in his personal spiritual quest, the old Muir dramatized his repeated encounters with civilization, and also documented the destruction of the world which the youth sought. The young Muir was not yet committed to preservation, or even to a life in the wilderness, but an older sterner Muir knew that he would be, and knew further that while the young man would never achieve the complete freedom for which he hoped, yet his vision of freedom was essential to accomplishing anything. Sometimes, he even put words into the young man's mouth which were obviously those of a more mature man. The result is a carefully orchestrated structure which shows young Muir torn between his desire to wander free in the wilderness until he found a home, and the necessities which required him to earn his bread while he continued to encounter other men - |