In three novels, The Studhorse Man, Gone Indian, and Badlands, Robert Kroetsch has faced the problem of historiography and apocalypse with obsessive insistence. Kroetsch's statement that the "experience of an absence is an experience" opposes earlier, European experiences of Canada as expressed by Rupert Brooke, who finds a troubling lack of selfhood in Canada's wilderness. Kroetsch's post-modern novels explore, rather, an unconcluded self, a complex of possibilities, and the lack of an ending, either psychically or temporally, thus acknowledging the fluidity of time
