Controversiality In Jack Schaefer's Shane

2019 will mark the 70th anniversary of Jack Schaefer’s canonical American Western novel Shane. Several years before his death in 1991, Schaefer commented that “all responsible writers of fiction, whatever form their work tales, are reformers at heart,” who are “dissatisfied with the world as it is and write about it as they believe it should be.” Jerry Xie, an English and Critical Theory professor at Lanzhou Jiaotong University in northwestern China, believes that the need to examine how and why this work of fiction reflects this ‘ultimate purpose’ and that we need to pursue the other question raised by the Marxist world outlook: what are the class limits of Schaefer’s ‘ultimate purpose’? Xie expressed that Shane’s peculiarity is connected
Rather than being understood controversiality, Shane has always been regarded and accepted as a popular story for teenage and adult readers. Shane is controversial because it is a text of culture that tries to teach readers to accept the social order of capitalism, and their class position within the capitalist structure, as the natural and inevitable civilizing process of humankind. The novel’s peculiar controversiality is an ideological effect of its dialectical quality. View in this way, Shane is controversial because it reflects the existence of classes in their historically situated movement and contradictoriness, yet the story is at the same time uncontroversial because it deflects the problem of class struggle through the mysterious singularity of Shane. Shane is dialectical because its unity of opposites depends upon the controversiality of class conflict while at the same time seems to have nothing to do with class conflict and instead is about a man whose name remained
The dominant ideology is an effect of the class structure in which popular stories function to the uncontroversial class itself as the fundamental social division. By making Shane a mystery beyond comprehension, the novel tries to persuade readers that Shane’s peculiar heroism is in us all and in this place where the working class and the innocent homesteaders can live in communities of harmony without questioning the regime of a class that links every little valley in the system of exploitation. The ruthless force that Shane unleashes against Luke Fletcher’s gang is an individualized and localized form, a reflection of the ruthless force of doing what has to be done to put an end to classes through revolution. Shane is a text of evocative writing that articulates the American Western with an innovative sense of depth. Schaefer helps to make the American Western ‘new’ again for ‘western’ readers in the post-World War II renewal capitalism as an increasingly complex logic of social relations in which the working class and the ruling class get along and forge a trans-class alliance against socialist and communist alternatives to the concept of a free world. This sense of innovativeness is also shaded by an uncontroversial aura of easy reading. James C. Work proposes that "we are looking at a story with archetypal overtones” in which Shane may