Monday 10-20

This exasperated collection of Brautigan’s musings on the state of nature is one to ponder. The personification of Trout Fishing in America is the theme of interest to this response. I am going to assume that Trout Fishing in America as a character represents the “gemeinschaft,” or rural America as it was before the colonialism of industry.
As a “legless, screaming wino” on page 45, T.F.I.A. (with “shorty” added to the end of his title) is despised by the children pressured into charity for the sake of the barely movable man. The protagonists of the chapter, (be they the children or not) relish him as sort of an antique. “Maybe a museum might be started. Trout Fishing America Shorty could be the first piece in an important collection.” (46) T.F.I.A.S. gets his brain cleaned at a Laundromat and is likened to have “pedaled down to San Jose in his wheelchair, rattling along the freeway at a quarter of a mile an hour.” A backwards individual, T.F.I.A.S. has a hard time functioning with societal norms.
This chapter illustrates a direct comparison between T.F.I.A. and the San Francisco homeless community. Chewed up by the urban social order and spit out upon Washington Square, the “winos” are as equally displaced as the decaying environment surrounding the city. In a later chapter titled “The Last Mention of Trout Fishing In America Shorty” the homeless man is revisited by Brautigan and his infant daughter. The attempts to steal from the man and is intimidated when he welcomes her. She is driven to a sandbox, a symbol of nature encapsulated and convenient. It is as though the modern generation that fosters the child rejects the wild, uncontained natured of T.F.I.A. that “stared after her as if the space between them were a river growing larger and larger.” (97). The gap between the old and the new is widening and the old ways of the free spirit are handicapped like the old man.
All of the “replies” signed by T.F.I.A. denote a hint of nostalgia towards nature despite being seemingly unconnected with fishing. “Tomorrow I’m leaving for Alaska. I’m going to find an ice cold creek near the Arctic where that strange beautiful moss grows and spend a week with the grayling” (76). Thus T.F.I.A., fed up with New York, moves to Alaska. Perhaps a final line is crossed with T.F.I.A.; maybe New York was his last attempt to educate the masses on the theory of Trout Fishing. Are the “friends” T.F.I.A. is visiting the city itself? Are they the “dead people” (77) that invade his bathroom to use his sheet to cover themselves up?
In a similar letter style chapter titled “Trout Fishing in America with the FBI,” (41), T.F.I.A. denounces the FBI’s investigation of a criminal as a way to exploit the trout stream. “The FBI agents watched the path, the trees, the black stump, the pool and the trout as if they were all holes punched in a card that had just come out of a computer.” The government is extending it’s law enforcement to patrol the trout stream. Order is placed on the environment according to the laws of modern culture The notion of surveillance adds a mechanical element to the stream, and the FBI agents see the natural environment as another extension of their job (“it appears to be part of their training” 42).
The character of Trout Fishing in America, while taking different pseudonyms and personalities, maintain true to Brautigan’s notions of rural Americana. A thing of the past, something forgotten by most and scorned by modernity. Trout Fishing in America, the man.