t wild flowers on its banks. Evening primroses, the fireweed, and butterfly weed grew to a tropical size and brilliance there among the sedges." (Cather 165)While Cather blatantly overwhelmed her characters with the beauty of nature surrounding them, Steinbeck immersed his characters so deeply in their surroundings it seemed as if they were unaware of them, just as we are unaware of the oxygen we breathe or the way our heart is constantly beating. The one part of nature that is most often referred to is the forest surrounding Tortilla Flat, and even then only sparingly, and in a way that often downplays its existence, just the way we downplay things that seem common and unusual to us. On the second page of the story, where Steinbeck says the ?forest and town intermingle? he is making the forest seem more common, just another place for the adventures of Danny and his compatriots to occur.Sentences that could carry more weight in other narratives are simplified in this story, to the point where they are stated as simple facts, as opposed to the poetic lines that they could have been written as. ?The sun was warming the beach now.? (Steinbeck 91) This sentence could have easily been developed into an entire paragraph about how the light of the sun reflected back from the froth of the waves and the sparkle of the sand, and so forth and so on. However, Steinbeck boils down the background to simple facts, making it easier to focus on the characters of Danny and his unorthodox Knights of the Round Table.In A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean may have attempted to boil all of the details away from the story to simplify it, but in doing so he highlighted certain parts of nature in such great detail that he helped exemplify the first sentence of the story. ?In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.? This is where Maclean provides the first glimpse into nature as a religious experience. Cather made natu...
