He rode into our valley in the summer of ’89.
The opening line of the novel situates the time frame for reader, but also acts to inform the reader of what to expect. This is going to be a flashback to an earlier. The narrative is going to be stark, stripped and declarative; no fancy language tricks or experimental fiction here. The very first word is also an abstract pronoun which foreshadows the abstract quality of the man to whom it refers: the mysterious Shane. What may seem like the simplest of all possible opening lines is actually fruitful and filled with the promise of everything that shall be rendered afterward.
He was not much above medium height, almost slight in build. He would have looked frail alongside father's square, solid bulk. But even I could read the endurance in the lines of that dark figure and the quiet power in its effortless, unthinking adjustment to every movement of the tired horse.
The first description of Shane may be surprising. Later, he will seem to take on the enormity of courage and responsibility and that memory will taint the actual facts. The subtext of Bob’s story is one that pits Shane actively against the bad men, but less actively against his own father. The two men contest for the admiration and hero-worship of young Bob and this description also give testament to how large his father actually loomed before the arrival of Shane.
“The open range can’t last forever. The fence lines are closing. Running cattle in big lots is for the top ranchers and it’s really a poor business at that.”
Joe shows shortly after Shane’s arrival that he is far more than the ignorant squatter that Fletcher and his minions would like to think. Joe reveals here an intellectual awareness of the necessity for change in the frontier that either eludes Fletcher or which he is facing while in deep denial. Joe here also reveals why he is a rightful opponent for Bob’s hero-worship. He’s not just some dumb farmer who would be run out of town on a rail were it not for Shane. He will divulge his own physical strength as well as his strength of character later, but in this early conversation he discloses an intelligence that is even perhaps the superior of Shane’s.
He was just different. He was shaped in some firm forging of past circumstances for other things.
After listening to the other homesteaders trying to warn his father not to trust Shane or keep him on as a hired hand, Bob describes how Shane proceeded to work every bit as hard and well as his father. Even so, it was clear that Shane was not and never would be a farmer. He then gives perhaps his clearest definition of what Shane really is within the ironic paradox of not explaining anything concretely. The phrase that he was forged by circumstances of his past is a statement not just intended to be applied to Shane. It is a statement of the West that will take shape long after men like his father and even Bob himself have passed on. The West was shaped by men like Shane and in the circumstances the forging created a shape that is different from what the rests of the country looks like.
“A man is what he is, Bob, and there’s no breaking the mold.”
Shane puts his philosophy in terms the young Bob—Bob the child—can understand and in terms that still sticks deeply within the older Bob—Bob the narrator—as he recalls the story of the mysterious stranger. What Shane says to Bob mirrors what he says to another gunfighter just like himself who hasn’t tried to break the mold. Their time is coming to an end, but the difference between the two hired guns is that Shane recognizes. Shane may not be able to change, but at least he’s alive and that is the real point he is trying to make Bob. You can’t break the mold, but you can recognize where that mold fits within the rest of society.
“What a man knows isn’t important. It’s what he is that counts.”
Bob’s father also has a philosophy about what makes a man. His view comes in the discussion he has with the other homesteaders about trusting Shane much earlier than the philosophy that Shane reveals to Bob. Joe seems to confirm to a point what Shane believes, but he phrases it in a slightly different way by creating just a slight division between acts a man commits and the essence of the man who commits them. Bob has had time to t mull over this distinction between when he overhears his dad say it and when he hears what Shane has to say. In the meantime, he’s watched Shane fight and shirk from fighting and work as a farmer and show off the gunfighting skills that made some men legends. By the time Shane finally gives voice to a personal philosophy, Bob has been forced to come a place where he will have to decide between his father and Shane. Shane is essentially telling him that his father is mistaken; that you cannot separate what a man knows—which at the time he makes this assertion is really just a subtle way of saying what a man has done to learn what he knows—from what he is. Shane—also using language games—is trying to tell Bob that no matter what good a man may do later in his life, he will always be the same man who did things that were maybe not so good earlier in his life.
He was the man who ride into our little valley out of the heart of the great glowing West and when his work was done rode back whence he had come and he was Shane.
The novel’s closing line shows that time has allowed Bob to reconcile what he knows about Shane with what his father believes about men. He has chosen to adopt his father’s philosophy. The novel ends with a grown-up Bob musing over how Shane became a legend in the town subject to mythologizing and gossiping and theorizing about who he had once been before that summer of ’89. Bob rejects them all leaves us with the definition of what this mysterious man actually was. He is Shane and that’s what counts.
