The Narrator In James Welch's Winter In The Blood

James Welch’s novel Winter in the Blood tells the nonlinear story of an unnamed narrator. The novel opens with the narrator realizing his girlfriend, who he has been passing off as his wife, has ran off with his rifle and his electric razor. He is currently living with his mother and grandmother. Not too long later, his mother, Teresa, marries a man named Lame Bull who becomes the proprietor of her land. The narrator helps Lame Bull farm the land. The narrator goes through his days helping with the family farm, getting drunk in town bars, and having sexual encounters with women. Through often alcohol-included daydreams the narrator reflects back on his life and the trauma he has experienced, chiefly the deaths of his father and brother. After one of his journeys to look for his girlfriend, the narrator returns home to find out that his grandmother had passed away. The family buries

James Welch gives a very accurate and heartbreaking look at the grief of losing loved ones. It is particularly profound in the way he weaves these traumatic events throughout this nonlinear narrative to have the deepest impact on the readers and on our narrator. The namelessness of the narrator is important to his loss of identity, another important theme of the work. The narrator does not fulling understand who he is until after his realization during the last talk with Yellow Calf and after he has truly dealt with the loss of his brother. Another distinction with Welch’s novel is its interesting shifting tone. At times, it has a bleak and matter-of-fact tone, when the narrator is sober and working in the field. Oppositely, when the narrator goes to town to the bar and gets drunk, the tone shifts to near surrealism in which neither the narrator nor the audience knows what is really occurring. Lastly, near the end of the novel, the tone slightly shifts to slightly more optimistic about what the future will bring for our