Place/Landscape

In Nebraska, Springsteen makes the move so necessary for good writers grounded, like he is, in a region; he expands his regionality by looking to the inner psyches that emerge out of a landscape of mind. Bruce has always been aware that, to use Mary Austin’s phrase, place must be “of the country rather than about it”; his songs set in New Jersey were not told from a outsider’s perspective, but certainly they were told by narrators who felt like outsiders (Austin 106). In order to maintain his commitment to place in the songs in Nebraska, Bruce looked into his, and our, common desires, shames, emotions, and social paradigms to express what he saw as an American landscape of limitless hopelessness. And this landscape, while concrete and real, is not merely one of the “lesser angels,” to use Eudora Welty’s term, of setting or stage(Welty ); landscape is not even the a set of “powerfully connected metaphors [which link] the voices of his characters to the ground on which they stood” as Bob Crane explains (Crane 342): Bruce Springsteen’s landscape is the infinitely real region of desolation that emerges out of our common condition, whether it is in Lincoln, Nebraska or Atlantic City, New Jersey. This idea is exemplified in “Nebraska” where the true-life narrator travels an American landscape of murderous alienation that while set in Nebraska and Wyoming, is familiar to all of us from San Ysidro to Blacksburg, Virginia. The paradigm change expressed in the album is also mirrored in the record’s cover, which, unlike the majority of Bruce’s albums, has no people on it, not even the Boss himself.