Alongside the frontier landscapes of the Great Plains and the Southwest in Willa Cather's novels, one expects that the descriptions of desert environments in Paul Bowles's work from another colonial frontier, North Africa, will similarly emphasise extent. In this chapter, I will highlight a more prevalent element in his fiction that is the most basic and recognisable aspect of the view from above: verticality. That a figure must obtain a focal point higher than what is described is a definitional feature of aerial description – perhaps its only essential component. The process of getting to a lifted vantage point and the phenomenology of being up high is usually effaced by the immediacy of the view that is afforded by the climb. Conventionally, the transition from low to high takes the form of representations of transportation that open up a new setting for the plot to advance, prolonging time for extended representations of interiority. Often, the representation of travel will be skipped altogether. Here I will highlight the function of transition from down below to up above, while maintaining a focus on the form of environment that structures the climb and the eventual view.

Postclassical narratology (particularly approaches that utilise cognitive science) conceptualises space by drawing equivalencies between psychological processes of perceiving space and the linguistic construction of space in narrative discourse. Similarly, Bowles criticism has developed a psychologised spatial dynamic through its repeated emphasis on interiors and exteriors in both Bowles's fiction and his symbolic proximity to the American literary canon. These systems lack meaningful theories of verticality, or what makes the view from above different from ‘grounded’ perception and its representation. In this way, conventional analyses of description emphasise the ways that description helps construct or form the narrative story logic. But by turning attention to images of the environment, it becomes clear that descriptions have an opposing effect.

If narrative theory does focus on the vertical relationship between seer and seen, it often takes for granted the significance of transportation and the trip upwards in its construction of types of narration and description.