The Right Stuff Literary Elements

Nonfiction/20th Century History

America at the height of the Cold War in the late 1950s/early 1960s and the interior of the Mercury space capsules during space flight.

The narrative perspective of the book is complex and complicated. Although mostly written from a third-person perspective, Wolfe often takes the reader into the mind of a character and projects the narrative outward from within that perspective while still engaging third-person pronouns.

Also complicated: a very complex blending of myth-making and ironic subversion of myth.

Protagonists: The seven Mercury astronauts. Antagonists: The Soviet space program.

"Our rockets always blow up."

Despite being the third of the astronauts to be launched, the story really reaches its climax with John Glenn’s first orbital flight by an American.

You could see these pilots struggling to put up enough chips to stay in the God & Family game with this pious Marine named Glenn.” The very first press conference introducing America’s very first astronauts foreshadows how John Glenn will emerge as the superstar who becomes synonymous with NASA.

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Biblical imagery is used allusively to situate the Mercury astronauts as mythic heroes chosen by God for a special purpose: “…what the multitudes showed John Glenn and the rest of them on that day was something else. They anointed them with the primordial tears that the right stuff commanded. The seven righteous families were put up in suites at the Waldorf-Astoria.”

“Spam in a can” is a derisive term for the space program coined by the Commanding Officer at Edwards AFB. The imagery works on at least two somewhat conflicting levels. The origin of the term was directed to the complain that it was a waste of test pilots’ training because they would not actually be flying the craft; that would be done on the ground by mission control. The imagery has a much darker connotation as well: without the ability to take control of the craft in a life-threatening emergency situation, the astronaut would essentially be dead meat in a tin can.

“The right stuff” is the essential quality necessary to become a successful test pilot (one who doesn’t die on the job) but what that quality is cannot be defined.

Chuck Yeager is a major character in the book despite not being chosen to even participate in astronaut training because he lacked a college degree. His mythic status as a test pilot who remained fully in control of his craft throughout his career is paralleled with the story of the Mercury astronauts for the purpose of comparison and contrast.

“`I think they’re gonna put me on the number-three elevator.’ He was talking about the number-three elevator used for moving aircraft up to the flight deck on the carrier Kearsage. This was a bit of the Schirra metonymy for `squarely on target.’”

Chuck Yeager is situated as the personification of “the right stuff.”