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Well, you'll probably wind up on the same desert sooner or later.

In Scene Nine, when the brothers announce their intentions to go to the desert, Mom speculates that they will find their father sooner or later. Austin and Lee assure their mother that they will be traveling to a different desert than the one where their father lives. Mom, however, sees the inevitability of their flight, and knows that they will somehow wind up on the same desert with the old man. Indeed, Shepard returns to his beloved theme of hereditary destiny thoroughly in True West. In Shepard's world the child is preordained to repeat the sins of the father, no matter how he may try to fight it. Austin has worked all of his life to distance himself from his father. But his Ivy League diploma and stable job do not release him from the curse of his father. At the beginning of the play Austin winces when introducing Lee, the picture-perfect image of his father. Austin wants to have no ties to his family, yet by the end of the play is begging Lee to take him out to the desert. When Mom talks about winding up on the same desert she succinctly sums up a preoccupation of both Christian tradition and modern psychology, that the sins of the father will be placed on and reenacted by the son.

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