The Octopus: A Story of California

“He had set himself the task of giving true, absolutely true, poetical expression to the life of the ranch, and yet, again and again, he brought up against the railroad, that stubborn iron barrier against which his romance shattered itself to froth and disintegrated, flying spume. His heart went out to the people, and his groping hand met that of a slovenly little Dutchman, whom it was impossible to consider seriously. He searched for the True Romance, and, in the end, found grain rates and unjust freight tariffs.”

Presley’s interior struggle reflects the early ideology he intends for his epic poem, the Song of the West. It suggests Presley’s background of higher learning and intellect has essentially alienated him from the realities of his subject, leaving him unable to reconcile the banalities that make up life on the western frontier. It also immediately positions the Railroad as an antagonist to the locals’ aspirations.

“Then, faint and prolonged, across the levels of the ranch, he heard the engine whistling for Bonneville. Again and again, at rapid intervals in its flying course, it whistled for road crossings, for sharp curves, for trestles; ominous notes, hoarse, bellowing, ringing with the accents of menace and defiance; and abruptly Presley saw again, in his imagination, the galloping monster, the terror of steel and steam, with its single eye, cyclopean, red, shooting from horizon to horizon; but saw now as the symbol of a vast powers, huge, terrible, flinging the echo of its thunder over all the reaches of the valley, leaving blood and destruction in its path; the leviathan, with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil, the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power, the monster, the Colossus, the Octopus.”

Norris, in his characteristically rolling language, unveils for the first time the scope of the novel’s central, monstrous symbol. Presley has just witnessed the obliteration of the sheep and lost the inspiration for his epic poem, and he suffers this harrowing vision, which looms over the rest of the novel. The chapter opens with Presley noticing the sound of the train and thinking little of it, and it closes upon this same sense, though Presley is now aware of the horror that grips the land.

“Annixter had no particular interest in the dog. For weeks at a time he ignored its existence. It was not his dog. But to-day it seemed as if he could not let the subject rest. For no reason that he could explain even to himself, he recurred to it continually. He questioned Hilma minutely all about the dog. Who owned him? How old did she think he was? Did she imagine the dog was sick?”

Naturalism focuses on the unknown motivations that direct people’s lives. Here, Annixter suffers an interior agitation at Hilma’s presence because he harbors deep feelings for her. However, Annixter, unconsciously avoiding his own inner depths, preoccupies himself with the superficial working of his mind: his fixation on the dog.