Just got your e-mail so I put my response in a post.

In my opinion the details that give us our first clue to the western nod of this story is the dialogue. Wrought with grammatical errors, we all know outlaws never made the dean’s list, and sentence scrunching contractions like; ain’t, the dialogue harkens back to the days of gunslingers and cowboys. The author follows the rich dialogue with the appropriate accoutrements for a western. I mean really, any western worth it’s salt wouldn’t be complete without it’s fair share of :
“…horse thieves, back stabbers, dry-gulchers, claim-jumpers, …”
The shoot-outs, the robberies, the way the characters were dressed, each of these things scream of a western story. Oh and let’s not forget the sawed off Winchester scattergun.
However there were a few things that I found inconsistent. Granted, I may be tainted by my love of Sergio Leone but if it is to be a western, a true grit dusty boot heels
knocking on the hardwood floor western, then they’ve got to ride around on hoarse back. Every time I started to hear spurs jangling in my head along came a reference to some sort of automobile and destroyed the illusion for me. Every time they talked about Doc’s Ford I started to think of Bonnie and Clyde instead of The Man with no Name. Car’s in my mind speak to a different time period, one just after the “wild” west but maybe I’m just being naïve of American history.
Also there was a little bit too much education in these outlaws. I don’t mean to imply that in my mind the true western is filled with a bunch of blithering idiots. I’m not against them reading or writing or even composing the occasional poem but being, “completely educated at the Newata (OK) School of Industrial Arts,” was a bit much for me. It seems to me that the more education a man gets the less likely he is to stray toward a life of robbin’ and thievin’.
I have to admit I found it difficult to extract Chandler’s individual rhetoric or thesis from the sea of paraphrasing, citations, and devils advocate arguments. Please forgive me, I didn’t get my nap today but I didn’t see a clear personal opinion on the part of Daniel Chandler but rather a barrage of quoted opinions from other authors. That being said I shall do my best to complete the assignment.
I believe his argument was summed up in the last paragraph, the last paragraph typically being the conclusion, yet I do not feel comfortable quoting it since it is clearly cited from (Derrida 1981, 61). This was however something I agreed with. It is impossible to consider all of story telling without instinctively wanting to group them together somehow, seeing commonality somewhere along the line. In the case of The Purpose of This Creature Man it is perfectly reasonable to consider the elements of story that the reader finds conflicting to the typical western as the authors attempt to make the story original. On the other hand there are other elements in the story that burn so brightly, the story on a whole cannot help but be classified as a western.I believe this has a much broader application. Although there are stories that have yet to be written and original ideas we haven’t seen yet, at some point any story will lend itself to classification of some sort.