Larry McMurtry's purpose in his novel The Last Picture Show was to illustrate how the conventions of the Western, and the values they represent, have become anachronistic. Because the novel takes up the story of people who have taken different routes in maturity, the wide-angle lens provided by a third-person narration has the utility of permitting a gradual reengagement of their lives without sacrifice of information about what they have been doing for a quarter-century. Sonny Crawford, Duane Moore, and Jacy Farrow are the major actors in The Last Picture Show, it seems evident that McMurtry wishes to subordinate their particular destinies to portrayal of the ways of life available in common to them and their contemporaries in the teenaged cohort of Thalia. The group portrayal works to displace the sense that we are reading another Bildungsroman, although each main character's career in the novel can be read as an initiation and an education. The element obsessing each of their careers-namely, sex-instead encourages us to take the novel as a broadened study of manners and follies. A description of the structure issuing from McMurtry's selection of the third-person omniscient narrative viewpoint is found in an essay by Donald E. Fritz, entitled "Anatomy and The Last Picture Show: A Matter of Definition."
McMurtry writes often about sexual behavior, indicating that it provides an avenue for depiction of character and society. In Fritz's argument, however, The Last Picture Show is less a presentation of characters acting within a society-an all-purpose definition of the ordinary novel-than it is "a novel strongly pulled in the direction of an anatomy, that is, toward an encyclopedic investigation of one specific human concern, specifically, the sexual attitudes and activities of Texas in the 1950s" (Reynolds 1989, 187). The structure of the novel, then, becomes a tapestry of case studies of characters absorbed by sex.
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