John,
    This is powerful material. As grammarians and English teachers, we could spend much more time on the power of crafted speech, which is pretty much all a dramatist has to work with. It's certainly highly elliptical.
    To me, the "it"'s that show up early turn out (retroactively) to be pronouns, standing in for "how to live in the desert." Then in Austin's second speech, we get existential "there"'s. I'm not quite sure about "it" in "it was different." In context, I would be tempted to say it's a pronoun reference to "life" or "the emotional feel of life," but existential I think would be the usual analysis. The next "it" in "it's the fifties" would seem to me to stand in for "the present time" or "the times when I come down here." "I keep coming down here thinking that I am still living in the fifties."
    I was a little confused by "there never was [something here for me]" followed by "When we were kids it was different," though a speaker in a play can certainly change his/her mind in mid-speech. It seems like a contradiction.
    Nice passage.

Craig

On 10/28/2010 8:27 PM, John Chorazy wrote:
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Good evening... Thanks to all for the wealth of information regarding my question. Even the differing impressions offer good dialogue and shed insight, and for that I'm appreciative.
 
I'll include herein some context for the sentence models, but I rather liked your notions based on the bare models alone first. Though certainly we understand exactly what Austin means here because of context, my close reading attempted to unpack Shepard's specific use of language in this section. The play between "there," "it," "that," and "here" is fascinating as a subject of its own; "It" as a much larger symbol than impersonal pronoun, "there" and "here" as geographical landmarks imbued with meaning, sense of place and/or disclocation, etc...  Thanks again.
 
 

LEE: It’s not somethin’ you learn out of a Boy Scout Handbook!

AUSTIN: Well how do you learn it then! How’re you supposed to learn it!

LEE: (stands) What’re you, crazy or somethin’? You went to college. Here, you are down here, rollin’ in bucks. Floatin’ up and down in elevators. And you wanna’ learn how to live on the desert!

AUSTIN: I do, Lee. I really do. There’s nothin’ down here for me. There never was. When we were kids here it was different. There was a life here then. But now—I keep coming’ down here thinkin’ it’s the fifties or somethin’. I keep finding myself getting off the freeway at familiar landmarks that turn out to be unfamiliar. On the way to appointments. Wandering down streets I thought I recognized that turn out to be replicas of streets I remember. Streets I misremember. Streets I can’t tell if I lived on or saw in a postcard. Fields that don’t even exist anymore.

LEE: There’s no point cryin’ about that now.

 
 
Sincerely,
 
 
 
John
 


 


John Chorazy
English III Academy, Honors, and Academic
Pequannock Township High School

Nulla dies sine linea.

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