Alabama Moon

Alabama Moon comes alive in its macro-setting of a rural, thickly forested region in the eighties, before updated and advanced technology existed that would have made Moon easier to find and catch (e.g., personal GPS trackers and smartphones). Moon’s ability to disappear into the woods and live undetected for lengths of time with the survival skills Pa taught him is most logical in the dense Alabama forests where memorizing terrain is complicated for the most seasoned of explorers.

The many micro-settings of Alabama Moon help to characterize Moon. Initially he is comforted by and comfortable within the shelter and the forest where Pap raised him. Details of other micro-settings, like the shelves of goods at Mr. Abroscotto’s store, Pinson’s bunk room, and the soft mattress at Hal’s trailer, indirectly show Moon’s changing feelings via his reaction to them. He wants sugar at the store but is content without it; Pinson’s close quarters and inability to leave make him ill; he admits that a mattress and house are safe and comfortable.

The forests serve as characters themselves by working as ally archetypes to Moon. They hide and protect him, supply his food and necessities, and offer sounds and other sensory fulfillment for him. The more he acclimates to the modern world, the less attuned Moon is toward his forest ally. By the time he arrives at the shelter with Sanders late in the novel, Moon thinks, “[…] it seemed the forest had forgotten about me. It did nothing to help me” (224). On his walk to see the shelter for the last time, Moon waits to feel some connection to it, but to him it now possesses “ugliness.” When he leaves the forest, he is leaving a “dead thing” (284-85). Moon’s changed perception of these former allies demonstrates the arc of both his character and the forests’ character in the story.