The Crossing

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1994

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Pages 3-64

Part 1, Pages 64-127

Part 2

Part 3, Pages 215-274

Part 3, Pages 274-332

Part 4

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

The She-Wolf

At the start of the novel, there aren’t any known wolves on the Parham land—Echols and other hunters have eradicated them. The she-wolf’s arrival signals the intrusion of the natural, chaotic world into the story. The wolf exists outside of the rules of man, and Billy’s attempts to tame it represent his fatal misunderstanding about his own relationship to chaos and violence, which lurks just beneath the surface of his life as a teenager on land that is in transition from the frontier.

The novel portrays tension between the wolf’s own desire to be free and Billy’s mission, which for him symbolizes restorative justice for the regal order of the natural world. Though the wolf and Billy do form a wary bond, she only submits to his care with no other option, and the danger she represents remains a key reality in their companionship. Billy, however, invests more meaning into her—after she is taken from him, he speaks to her in English while she’s in captivity: “he said what was in his heart. He made her promises that he swore to keep in the making. That he would take her to the mountains where she would find others of her kind” (105). Billy sees the wolf as an opportunity to make sense of the world, yet the reality is more complicated. To the Mexican authorities, he is endangering their community, and most people Billy encounters see him as naïve and think “a wolf is a wolf” (105), highlighting the disconnect between Billy’s perception of the world and the more complicated reality.

Corridos and Folk Heroes

Corridos are Mexican folk ballads that gained prominence during the Mexican Revolution and typically tell the stories of rebels and bandits who stand up to authority figures. In the time period of The Crossing, they were often romances or tragedies about heroes riding to their doom. When Boyd and Billy fight with Hearst’s men and break the back of the one-armed bandit, they become the subjects of such stories, and Boyd slowly comes to embody the archetype of the güerito (blondie)—the American outsider who stands up for what’s right.

The corridos about Boyd embody his place in part of a narrative—one that he willingly seeks out—and Billy’s desire to glean the facts from the corridos about the güerito show his repeated failure to embrace the lesson that strangers try to impart upon him. From the caretaker of the church, to Quijada, to the wanderers he meets at the end of the novel, many people that Billy encounters in Mexico try to teach him that the story is what’s most important, and what a person chooses to believe about the world has its own meaning. This is a lesson that Boyd readily accepts but Billy struggles with, which is symbolized by their relationships to their own stories: Boyd disappears into one, and Billy cannot bring himself to do so. Toward the end of the novel, Billy begins to tell his own story, but stops himself, saying “I just got to jabberin” (420). The lyrical, elemental truth of the world around him remains beyond his ability to comprehend.

Border Crossings

Billy Parham crosses into Mexico three times over the course of the novel, and each time marks a portentous shift in the circumstances of his life. In the first, he unwittingly abandons his family to die at the hands of robbers. In the second, he sets himself and his brother on a path that will lead only to devastation. In the third, he is forced to face the finality of his brother’s death. The first border crossing is treated with a sense of ceremony and importance as the narrative shifts to an American man watching Billy slip from view:

[…] soon they were swallowed up and lost horse and rider in the oncoming night. The last thing he saw on that windblown waste was the white bandaged leg of the wolf moving random and staccato like some pale djinn out there antic in the growing cold and dark. Then it too vanished […] (72).

From the American’s perspective, Billy and the wolf have metaphorically passed out of the realm of existence and into a dream state. This is reflected in the style and structure of the text as well, which becomes more dreamlike and mythical in its descriptions and features longer unbroken passages of the journey compared to the shorter scenes of the novel so far. The characters Billy meets change too, as do the nature of his conversations. Gone are the practical matters of his father and of his neighbors, replaced by philosophical rumination and elliptical warnings in Spanish. It’s clear that Billy has entered a land he is unprepared for.

These shifts continue each time Billy crosses the border: America is rendered as a practical place approaching modernity, and Mexico is an elemental dreamscape that seems haunted by its past. Tellingly, the novel often grounds this difference in Billy’s subjective understanding of the world around him, and Mexican characters like the hacendado’s son and the drunken veteran Alfonso are quick to point out that Billy is disrespecting their history and culture through his lack of understanding. In this way, crossing into Mexico is at once a symbol of entering the chaotic, often-violent world of adulthood and a subtle criticism of Billy’s naïveté for treating Mexico as such in the first place.