The Great Alone

“‘Sweet Jesus, it’s 1974. I have a job. I make money. And a woman can’t get a credit card without a man’s signature. It’s a man’s world, baby girl.’” 

Women’s restricted agency during the late ‘70s contextualizes Cora’s struggle to find herself. As she goes to ask for a credit card, which she won’t receive, Leni sees her mother dress more conservatively than she would normally to embody a more traditional form of femininity. The knowledge that women are at a societal disadvantage informs Cora and Leni’s feelings of victimization. The idea of it being “a man’s world” is also the reason they must leave Alaska after Cora kills Ernt. Cora and Leni cannot count on the law’s sympathy.

“Leni heard her mother start to cry, and somehow that made it worse, as if her tears watered this ugliness, made it grow.”

After Ernt hits Cora, Leni realizes that her mother has tolerated her father’s violence for years while making excuses for him. Leni realizes that Cora’s excuses have enabled her father’s violence to continue. Cora accepts the blame that rightly belongs to Ernt. This behavior is due to Cora’s low self-esteem and her idea that no one will love her like he does.

“‘Maybe if you stayed Outside you never would have become who you are now. I know about ‘Nam, and it breaks my heart what you boys went through. But you can’t handle the dark, can you? It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Most folks can’t. Accept it and do what’s best for your family.’” 

Large Marge tells Ernt this when she and Tom confront him about his abuse towards Cora. Knowing that Ernt’s symptoms are getting worse in the punishing Alaskan winter, Large Marge appeals to Ernt’s love for his family to persuade him to leave for the winter and send money to his family. Her statement echoes the belief that Alaska is only for those who can brave the winters and the hardship. 

“Breakup in Alaska. The season of melting, movement, noise, when the sunlight tentatively came back, shone down on dirty patchy snow.”

The season is about to quickly change from winter to spring in Alaska. Leni makes a note of the breakup right before Ernt returns early, breaking his usual pattern. While the landscape is quickly changing, its inhabitants need to be cautious. Breakup defines Ernt’s quick descent into madness after his return. It also encompasses the separation Leni and Matthew face after the latter’s tragic accident.

“A part of Leni wanted to keep this from her mother, to spare her pain, but the truth was burning a hole in Leni’s soul. Sharing it was the only way to put out the flames. They were a team she and Mama. Together. They didn’t keep secrets from each other.”

Leni doesn’t want to tell her mother that she saw her father leave with a duffel bag to vandalize the saloon, but to do that would mean dealing with it alone. Leni and her mother have supported each other from the beginning, especially with respect to dealing with Ernt. While Cora tests this by keeping his violence from Leni, Leni herself is unable to keep things from Cora.

“If you wanted to live in a place where no one told you what to do and didn’t care if you parked a trailer in your yard or had a fridge in your porch. Alaska was the state for you. His aunt said it was the romance of adventure that attracted so many individualists.” 

Matthew thinks this during his time away from Kaneq. His grandmother, whose article he shows Leni, stands as an example of an independent woman drawn in by the romance of adventure. Leni herself starts off as a romantic who has trouble fitting in and ends up developing the rugged individualism that characterizes so many Alaskans, including the Walkers. This individualism is what draws her back to Alaska against the wishes of her grandparents.

“She just knew she couldn’t turn away from it, not after so many lonely years, even though she felt danger slip silently into the water and swim toward her.”

Leni’s attraction to Matthew is more powerful because he was her only friend her own age. At the same time, she is also aware that her father might become violent if he found out about their friendship, due to his animosity for Matthew’s father. While she risks the danger of becoming close to Matthew, Leni’s fears manifest when he suffers his accident. This painful reality dashes her dreams. 

“It helped, those few words, reminded Leni that in the vast landscape of Alaska, this cabin was a world of its own. And her mama understood.” 

If Alaska is harsh and hostile like Leni’s father, the cabin is a nurturing maternal space. When Cora validates Leni’s attraction to Matthew as Leni struggles with her feelings, Leni feels less alone. The narrative emphasizes the strength of the mother-daughter bond between Leni and Cora.

“God, she loved this place; she loved Alaska’s wild ferocity, its majestic beauty. Even more than the land, she loved the people to whom it spoke.” 

While out on a school trip, Matthew takes Leni to look at bears and tells her of how his grandfather made his homestead so close to bears. In hearing this description of his pioneering grandfather, Leni’s love for Alaska and those who live there overwhelms her. Her appreciation for Alaska and its inhabitants, also seen in her love of Robert Service poems, demonstrates that Leni also belongs there. 

“In the naïveté of youth, her parents had seemed like towering presences, omnipotent and all-knowing. But they weren’t that; they were just two broken people.”

Leni despairs at feeling trapped by her parents’ toxic love, her father’s rages, and her mother’s enabling of it, especially now that her father is building a wall to cut them off from their neighbors. Leni has followed her parents without complaint, such as when they moved to Alaska, but now comes to realize she needs to carve out a space for herself. Her opportunity comes when the University of Alaska at Anchorage accepts her. 

“When Dad looked at her, Leni saw what she saw so rarely in his eyes: love. Tattered, tired, shaved small by bad choices, but love just the same. And regret.” 

Leni can see this in her father even after he forbids her to go to the graduation party thrown in her and Matthew’s honor. Even though Ernt is abusive, there are moments when Leni can see that he loves her and Cora. While this is love, unlike the love Cora has for Leni, it is not enough to win out over Ernt’s self-destructiveness.

“But the connection between pain and love wasn’t linear. It was a web.” 

Leni thinks this when Mathew tells her that if her father loved her and her mother, he wouldn’t hurt Cora. Large Marge echoes this herself, but Leni is aware that Ernt’s own pain and fractured mind overpower his love for them. Similarly, Cora’s low self-esteem informs her acceptance of Ernt’s abusive behavior.

“She wanted to believe that there was a safe place for her and Mama, a do-over of their lives, a beginning that didn’t rise from the ashes of a terrible ending. Mostly, she didn’t want to feel solely responsible for her mama’s safety anymore.”

As Matthew reassures Leni that the community can keep her and Cora safe, Leni reflects on her own desire for independence. The years of taking care of her mother have exhausted Leni. This caretaking involves studying her father’s moods and trying to defuse his temper. Her constant concern is wearing, especially now that she has her own dreams she wants to follow with Matthew.

“Leni felt something then, a seismic shift in her thinking; like spring breakup, a changing of the landscape, a breaking away that was violent, immediate. She wasn’t afraid of this man anymore. Or if she was, the fear was submerged too deeply to register. All she felt was hatred.”

When Leni sees her father after Matthew’s accident and faces the additional loss of her dream to go to college, Leni becomes resentful enough to lose her fear of her father. She understands her internal shift it in terms of Alaska’s changing landscape. This change causes her to verbally lash out at Ernt, which draws his violence and Cora’s subsequent lethal defense.

“I never really knew the weight of sorrow before, how it stretches you out like an old, wet sweater.”

Leni writes this to Matthew, expressing her tumult of feelings after his accident, which she doesn’t know how to process. She’s feeling herself fray under the grief she feels at Matthew’s condition. Leni continues writing to Matthew even after she leaves Alaska.

“‘It’s funny, now that hope has become so slippery and unreliable, I realize that all those years when I was a kid thinking I didn’t believe in hope, I was actually living on it. Mama fed me a steady diet of he’s trying and I lapped it up like a terrier.’” 

Leni vents to Matthew about losing hope in her dreams with him. This hopelessness makes her see that her father will not improve either. At this lowest point, Leni realizes that she once believed her mother. This realization shows how much Leni has broken away from her family and her old patterns of thinking. With this change, Leni pressures her mother to join her in escaping.

“She saw the man who had used his fists when he was angry, saw the blood on his hands and the mean set to his jaw. But she saw the other man, too, the one she’d crafted from photographs and her own need, the one who’d loved them as much as he could, his capacity for love destroyed by war.”

When Leni looks at her deceased father for the last time, she is able to see the man that he used to be. This is not a real person she knew, but one that she imagined because she needed to have a father who loved her. The father who came back from war could never fully love due to his unchecked trauma. When her grandmother gives her Cora’s keepsakes, Leni recalls this image of her father as a memory she wants to keep despite knowing his true self.

“‘If you love him now, you’ll love him in ten years and in forty. Differently, maybe, faded version but he’s a part of you now. And you’re a part of him.’” 

Cora says this when Leni anguishes about leaving Matthew and asks her mother if she will forget him. This idea is also true about Alaska. Leni’s love remains, becomes a part of her, and changes her for the better. In Leni’s case, the endurance of her feelings for both Matthew and Alaska prompt her eventual return.

“‘We have plenty to eat and new clothes and when we all sit around the dinner table, we try to knit our lives together, dropped stitches and all.’” 

Leni sums up her reconciliation with her grandparents in this manner. If the relationship got torn, she speculates, love is then about trying to knit their lives together. This is a principle that will resonate with her reconciliation with Matthew and the knowledge of how much the accident has changed him. To move forward, they will need to come to terms with their separation.

“She had tamed the wildness within her as determinedly as she once tamed the wilderness itself.”

Leni is adaptable, like her mother. Leni does her best to acclimate to life in Seattle for her mother, grandparents, and son. She calls this camouflage, however. Despite all outward trappings, Leni continues yearning for Alaska and Matthew, to the point that she takes the opportunity her mother grants to return.

“Mama had wanted Leni to come home, but home was not just a cabin in a deep woods that overlooked a placid cove. Home was a state of mind, the peace that came from being who you were and living an honest life.” 

When faced with Chief Ward, Leni thinks of the warnings she received from her grandfather to stay silent about what happened to Ernt. While Leni knows that the law is not kind to women, she decides not to lie, even by omission. For Leni, returning to Alaska is not just a return to the familiar, but an unburdening of secrets and the guilt of having left Matthew.

“All she could hear was her own body, coming alive in this place that would always define her—her heart beating, her lungs drawing breath, her footsteps on the gravel of Main Street.” 

Leni’s return to Alaska is more than a homecoming; it is a coming back to herself. Because Alaska is within Leni, being in Alaska gives her a new physical awareness of herself. Leni’s physicality echoes her coming of age with Matthew.

“In the vast expanse of this unpredictable wilderness, you will either become your best self and flourish, or you will run away screaming, from the dark and the cold and the hardship. There is no middle ground, no safe place, not here in the Great Alone.”

This is the passage with which Leni ends her article. It echoes the article written by Matthew’s grandmother Lily. Leni’s article emphasizes that Alaska’s harshness requires those who live there to commit to their best selves and to be independent. However, inhabitants must also be willing to learn and adapt, as anything less than leads to failure.