Presley is the organizing intelligence in the novel. He often disappears from the action for long periods before arriving to observe a pivotal moment in the narrative, often to contextualize the emotional elements within an outside perspective. His quest to compose a “Song of the West” (10) delimits the sprawling tale Norris has to unfold. Educated in Eastern colleges, Norris suggests Presley’s refinement was “gained only by a certain loss of strength” (8), situating him outside of the world of physicality embodied by the ranchers and marking him as a perpetual outsider. Presley is acutely aware of this status, and he struggles throughout the novel to come to terms with his inner contradictions: He wants to write of “the People” but is naturally repulsed by them, and he wants to write of the true romance of the West but can only find “grain rates and unjust freight tariffs” (13).

Only after he abandons his pretenses about composing an epic of a vanished frontier does Presley realize his true subject: the oppression of the people by the banalities that originally discouraged him. His intellect encouraged by Caraher’s socialistic anarchism and by a viewing of the Millet painting The Man with the Hoe, Presley finds a proper place for his sympathies and composes “The Toilers.