Rightness with the land : spirit of place in the novels of Frank Waters

The five major Waters' novels examined in this study are People of the Valley, The Yogi of Cockroach Court, The Man Who Killed the Deer, Pike's Peak and The Woman at Otowi Crossing. Each offers a variation on how a reattunement to one's environment, to its spirit of place, can result in an individual's achieving the synthesis of reason and instinct, of conscious with unconscious which Waters projects. This attainment of a rightness with the land leads not to a Rousseauean return to innocence. Rather it will result in a new culture whose members, because they are no longer at war within themselves, can handle the responsibilities of being both rational and intuitive parts of nature.