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A young artist arrives on the plains to produce a film describing the region.
“I'm trying to piece together a plain where nothing exists but what artists claim to have seen. And when I've fitted those landscapes together into one great painted plain, then I'll step outside one morning and begin to look for a new country. I'll go in search of the places that lay just beyond the painted horizons; the places that the artists knew they were only able to hint at.��

He finds that the landowners have their own understanding of the plains, often differing from one another.
“Anyone surrounded from childhood by an abundance of level land must dream alternately of exploring two landscapes-one continually visible but never accessible and the other always invisible even though one crossed and recrossed it daily.��

He has acquired a patron and starts giving lectures on his observations, having been unsuccessful in completing his film.
“They supposed that their tinted papers (photographs) showed something of what a man saw apart from himself- something they called the visible world. But they had never considered where that world must lie��.that all the while the great tide of daylight was ebbing away from all they looked at and pouring through the holes in their faces into a profound darkness? If the visible world was anywhere, it was somewhere in that darkness�� an island lapped by the boundless ocean of the invisible.��

The novel ends with the man, now much older, turning the camera around and placing the len up to his own eye. The possibilities of the plains and human imagination, even consciousness itself, remain endless and unquantifiable.
“…I lifted my own camera to my face and stood with my eye pressed against the lens and my finger poised as if to expose to the film in its dark chamber the darkness that was the only visible sign of whatever I saw beyond myself.��

In the novel, a husband views the plains outside his house from one room and the wife from another. Gazing out the windows for hours and for many days, neither can form the words to describe what they are feeling, what the plains mean to them. Because, at times, our very language fails us.
In Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the first point states that the world was made up of the totality of facts. After this philosophical breakthrough, Wittgenstein meets with his teacher and fellow philosopher, Bertrand Russell, to discuss the Tractatus. Confused, Russell draws three dots on a page and asks Wittgenstein if now three dots exist in the world. To which Wittgenstein replies back that three dots on the page held before his eyes exist at this point in time. Reality and our experience of reality are hard to quantify.



From Last Letter to a Reader by Gerald Murnane-
“I wanted the book to be called Landscape with Darkness and Mirage. The publishers wanted The Plains, and I eventually gave way, which is something I still sometimes regret.��