Sunrise

The rehearsal with dime-novelist Daggart Caul establishes the accidental and ironic origins of Anton Vargas’s public identity. The words for which Vargas becomes famous are not his own, a detail that emphasizes The Mythologization of the American West. This theme is developed as a series of small, practical concessions that accumulate into a durable fiction. The scene illustrates how celebrity is manufactured through a combination of another’s charisma (Preacher’s actual defiance), a writer’s need for sellable drama (Caul’s script), and a performer’s willingness to inhabit a role (Vargas’s acquiescence). The motif of the Greyrock dime novel functions here as the mechanism for this transformation, turning a complex, morally ambiguous event into a simplified and profitable spectacle. Vargas’s later career, spent performing this line in arenas, is built on a borrowed moment, showing the deep gap between his legendary persona and his private self.

John Daisy’s justification for possessing Indigenous artifacts provides the novel’s case study in colonialist logic. Arguing that “inheritance… is a matter of spirit” (241), Daisy draws an analogy to Greek statues housed in a British museum to rationalize his claim to objects of Cheyenne and Miniconjou culture. This argument directly engages with The Ethics of Cultural Repatriation, exposing how a rhetoric of enlightened stewardship is used to legitimize the dispossession of a people. Daisy positions himself as the true spiritual heir to the artifacts, dismissing the claims of the living descendants of their creators, whom he implicitly frames as “ragged Greeks and Mohammedans” (241) unable to appreciate their own heritage. The broken arrow, which Vargas keeps hidden, becomes the concrete symbol of this conflict. For Daisy, it is a collectible, a token of a historic hunt with a European prince. For the Abadie family, it is a dangerous object whose theft threatens their son’s life, tying it back to the brutal power dynamics of the region. Vargas’s revulsion and his instinctive decision to lie about possessing the arrow pits him against Daisy’s self-serving philosophy, positioning him as a protector of the vulnerable rather than a champion of abstract “ideals.”

The confrontation between Vargas and Preacher in the dugout reveals the deep, irreconcilable rift that has defined their lives for decades. Vargas arrives seeking a dramatic, almost theatrical, form of closure: He offers Preacher the chance for revenge, framing his own death as an act of atonement that can settle an old debt. Preacher’s blunt refusal punctures Vargas’s romantic narrative. The exchange demonstrates that while Vargas’s actions are driven by personal loyalty and guilt, Preacher’s are rooted in unwavering political principle. Vargas abandoned the Fort Searles attack because he saw it as a foolhardy, selfish gesture; Preacher attempted it alone because he believed it was a necessary response to the government’s broken treaties and violent removal of the Northern Cheyenne. Their argument reveals two distinct moral frameworks. Vargas operates within a world of interpersonal bonds and regrets, while Preacher operates within a larger historical context of systemic injustice. The physical and emotional distance between them in the scene symbolizes the ideological chasm that has separated them since Vargas chose self-preservation over shared conviction.

The chapter’s conclusion shatters the fictional frame of the “Sunrise” manuscript with an abrupt shift to a metafictional voice. By addressing the author “Louise” in the second person, the narrative breaks the fourth wall, exposing the artifice of its own creation while also deepening the mystery over what happened to Louise in the moments before her death. This structural move foregrounds the author’s ethical anxieties about telling this story, questioning the right to determine the fate of historical figures and the morality of taking “artistic license with somebody’s life” (263). This digression resonates strongly with the conflict that started to emerge at the end of Part 3, as Colin defended his simplified version of Vargas’s myth from the version of history that Louise was exposing to him. In this way, while the novel has yet to definitively tie all the storylines together, they begin to converge on a thematic level. This self-conscious act of deconstruction links back to The Mythologization of the American West, demonstrating that all historical accounts, including this one, are constructed. The author’s struggle to find a fitting end for Vargas’s story reflects the novel’s broader project of resisting the simplistic conclusions typical of the dime novel Western. By revealing the storyteller’s hand, the narrative insists that the act of writing history is fraught with moral choices and that no ending can ever be truly definitive or neutral.