Showing the Insides

In Nathan Asch's "In Search of America," the narrator's journey is an educational one. His goal to "really find out how they live... What they eat and how they sleep, and what they talk about" refers not only to the sharecroppers he is seeking at that particular moment, but all of the people struggling in arduous circumstances whom he meets over the course of the story (285).

The narrator's notion of "them" initially puts distance between himself and the very people he attempts to understand. This is made especially clear as he converses with a laborer: "I said, 'I don't see how you people can live here.' The Negro said, 'We don't live here. We're just here.' " The narrator, too, is not living here where destitute families work for poor pay and uninhabitable conditions but is merely "just here"; rather than this being a point on which the narrator can connect with the laborers, both fail to engage.

As he travels, the narrator learns more about the problems and hardships of Depression workers, including hired beet harvesters, Mexican laborers, and loggers. He learns all of the things about him that he first set out to discover from visiting places where "if I stayed there another hour I didn't want to live" (302). But it is not until he ventures to Grand Coulee -- a place where he is assured he will be hated, and possibly assaulted, for being in a better state than the people there -- that he learns the true way these poor people live.

Instead of meeting with danger, the narrator meets a drunk who confides in him: "I'm a poet...I'm alone a lot. It comes out in words, sort of" (305-306). This is precisely what the narrator has been doing; traveling by himself and writing about his impressions and opinion of what he sees. But he writes for a newspaper, meaning that every word is intended for the eyes of others. This poet declares that his writings are "for nobody to read...I do it for myself" and that allowing others to read his work would be "too much like showing my insides" (306).

The drunk in Grand Coulee may work "with a shovel eight hours a day outside in the coulee," but in spite of his job, he views his true self as a poet (304). Asch ends the story with the lesson that narrator ultimately comes to learn: In learning about how these people live in America, he is not necessarily learning about the people of America themselves.