63 pages • 2 hours read
James WelchWinter In The Blood
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1974A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Impact and Unreliability of Memory
One of the most significant themes in the novel is that of memory—specifically the fallibility of memory, the impact memory has on shaping our perception of the world, and the effect that the intersection between its unreliability and importance can have on an individual. The narrator has been profoundly affected by the loss of his beloved brother, who died when the narrator was 12, and his father, who died when the narrator was in his late teens or early twenties; his memories of these events are blurred by time and trauma. It is not unusual for memories of traumatic events to be a mix of vivid and hazy, and this uncertainty is reflected early in the novel, when the narrator insists that, counter to his mother’s memory, he and his family found First Raise’s body themselves: “I had a memory as timeless as the blowing snow that we had found him ourselves, that we had gone searching for him after the third day, or the fourth day, or the fifth” (15). Despite the clarity of this memory, the narrator admits that the details of the event escape him: “I could almost remember going into the bar in Dodson and being told that he had left for home the night before; so we must have been searching the borrow pits” (15). The narrator’s use of qualifiers like “almost” and “must have been” add doubt to the recollection, along with contradictory details like the narrator’s initial statement that they went looking for First Raise after he'd been missing a few days, which contrasts with the almost-memory of being told that First Raise had left the previous day. The narrator tells his mother that her memory fails her, but internally he admits: “I had no memory of detail until we dug his grave, yet I was sure we had come upon him first” (15).
Failures in memory continue into the narrator’s present, particularly after a night of drinking in town. On some occasions, these lapses in memory involve women; the narrator wakes up alone in a hotel room with a memory or dream of having spent the night with the barmaid from Malta and cannot tell his dreams from reality. Later in the book, the narrator awakens, confused, in Malvina’s home—"I couldn’t figure out how I ended up on the couch with a rubber-back rug over me”—and looks around the room as though he’s never seen it before (65). Memory’s unreliability works in the other direction as well, often the only mechanism by which the narrator is able to access his feelings. For example, although he spends most of the novel insisting that he has no feelings for Agnes, seeing her from afar triggers an emotional response from him, a memory of the glowy feeling of being in love. This feeling revives his drive to find her, but once he’s actually with her, he struggles to access these feelings. Still, he grasps for them; for the narrator, his imagined future is often more real to him than the harsh present before him.
Though the narrator’s memory is explicitly revealed to be spotty and unreliable, it continues to shape his perceptions of the world in significant ways. One of these ways is his relationship with his mother, Teresa, who he perceives as cold and emotionally unavailable. Teresa tells the narrator family stories from his childhood, speaking fondly of his and his brother’s antics, and is evidently the parent who was consistently present and kept the family’s ranch functional, but the narrator thinks that he never got anything from her. Teresa asks if the narrator blames her for First Raise’s death; he says no, but moments later he thinks Teresa’s failure to give First Raise the respect and attention he needed was why the man stayed away so much (17).
Memory is thematically vital to this story, as it is the past that has shaped the narrator into the person he is today—not only the events of the past, but the narrator’s sense of distance from it. Though the narrator recognizes his memories are incomplete and sometimes contradictory, he still insists that they are largely correct and uses them to filter his understanding of the family history and relationships. The novel’s depiction of memory as fallible, and the time Welch devotes to allowing the narrator to ponder his memories, emphasizes how subjective, unreliable, and yet influential memory is.
Apathy as a Response to Trauma
The narrator’s apathy is one of his defining characteristics and one of the first things he tells the reader about himself; he mentions his mother, grandmother, and girlfriend, then notes, “none of them counted; not one meant anything to me. And for no reason. I felt no hatred, no love, no guilt, no conscience, nothing but a distance that had grown through the years” (1-2). As the novel progresses, the narrator experiences a number of significant events: the theft of his gun, involvement in a criminal plot to help the airplane man evade capture, baffling and surreal encounters with strangers, an assault, and the death of his grandmother. He also robs a man, watches an old man drop dead into his oatmeal, considers sexually assaulting a woman, and adjusts to the introduction of a new stepfather. Despite all of these events, the narrator shows strong emotion only when remembering his childhood before his brother’s death, and when confronting his grief on the night Bird dies trying to save the cow from the mud.
The shift from trauma to apathy is visible in the difference between the narrator’s initial response to witnessing his brother’s death and his later recollections about his father’s death. The narrator describes Mose’s death in vivid immediacy:
the movie exploded whitely in my brain, and I saw the futile lurch of the car as the brake lights popped, the horse’s shoulder caving before the fender. . . the smaller figure flying slowly over the top of the car to land with the hush of a stuffed doll. (112).
Likewise, earlier descriptions of the narrator’s childhood with Mose show him as a far less detached person, one who felt worry and pride, had dreams and goals, and wanted the respect and praise of his father and brother. By the time the narrator’s father dies years later, the narrator has already developed a sense of distance as a response to the grief and trauma of losing his brother and sustaining a lifelong injury as a child. He notes, “Instead of any feeling of sorrow for my dead father, I felt only relief that we had finally gotten the hole dug. The sorrow, what there was of it, came later” (108). In the events of the novel’s present, the narrator digs another grave and attends another funeral, this one for his grandmother. His thoughts are entirely divorced from the proceedings and neither the old woman’s death nor his mother’s grief seem to have any effect on him.
The narrator describes this apathy as a “distance,” explaining early that he feels only “a distance that had grown through the years” and further clarifying that “the distance I felt came. . . from within me. I was as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon” (2). This distance prevents him from forming bonds with anyone, including his mother, grandmother, and Agnes. He refers to this distance again in his second encounter with Yellow Calf; the narrator had avoided looking the old, blind man in his face because it “seemed a violation of something personal and deep” (118) as though the narrator feels shame at the ability to study someone who cannot see that they are being studied. In his blindness, the old man is removed from the world in an essential way, a quality that resonates with the apathetic and disconnected narrator. The narrator also mentions the concept of distance in the wake of Bird’s fall at the end of the novel. The narrator lies, sore and exhausted on the ground, and thinks, “Some people. . . will never know how pleasant it is to be distant in a clean rain, the driving rain of a summer storm. It’s not like you’d expect, nothing like you’d expect” (135).
The narrator’s “distance,” or apathy, functions as a coping mechanism for a man who experienced profound trauma and grief throughout his young life. Having lost two people who mattered deeply to him—his brother and father—it is understandable that the narrator has simply stopped allowing people to matter to him. The narrator’s difficulty in feeling empathy or forming close emotional connections to others can be traced to those early losses. Welch develops this theme by contrasting the narrator’s present “distance” with the vividness of his childhood memories, his confusion and lingering resentment about his father’s absence and death, and the way he sublimates his emotions, for example, using his empathy for Bird to access his own grief.
The Objectification of Women
One noteworthy way that the narrator’s “distance” works with the novel’s setting to develop a theme is in the objectification and dehumanization of women throughout the text. The narrator encounters many women in the course of the narrative—his mother, grandmother, Agnes, Ferdinand Horn’s wife, the woman on the bus, the barmaid in Malta, Malvina, and Marlene. On many occasions, the narrator and other men comment openly on the bodies of the women in their presence. An extended conversation about women’s body parts takes place on the night the narrator meets the airplane man and the barmaid in Malta: one of the men in suits refers to her as having a “nice little twitch”; the other says, “I wouldn’t mind a little bit of that myself” (40). The narrator and the men discuss the ideal breasts, with one saying that his wife “has big breasts and they just get in the way. What you can’t get in your mouth is wasted anyway,” while the other complains, “My wife has breasts that hang down to her knees and her nipples are too dark” (40). On the bus later in the novel, the narrator sits across from a young woman and stares at her legs, trying to imagine what she looked like undressed. Here, Welch employs what feminist theorist Laura Mulvey calls the male gaze, dissecting the women characters into their body parts, simultaneously sexualizing and dehumanizing them.
In his encounters with women—which primarily take place in or around bars—the narrator focuses on their bodies and invests little in acknowledging their humanity. A notable example of this is the narrator’s invasion of Malvina’s bed in the morning after she’d given a ride back to Havre and allowed him to sleep on her living room couch. The narrator enters the bedroom uninvited and finds her sleeping; he lifts the sheet and examines her naked body. He becomes aroused and begins to grope her. Malvina awakens and tells the narrator to stop and leave; in response, the narrator “dropped the sheet over her and sat for a moment, trying to decide how [he] should attack her” (67). It is only the thought of the young boy having breakfast in the next room that stops the narrator from raping Malvina, not guilt or shame at having thought of it as an option. In this moment, the narrator prioritizes a child’s wellbeing over Malvina’s. This is another example of dehumanization: The narrator cares about the impact of sexual violence on Malvina’s male child but does not consider how it would affect Malvina at all.
This thought process is taken to its logical conclusion in a later scene, when the narrator assaults and restrains Marlene the morning after their lovemaking. Again, he begins by groping a naked woman. When Marlene murmurs a request for oral sex, the narrator slaps her and then uses his body weight and leverage to restrain her. He watches her panicked struggle and her frustration at her own helplessness. Marlene begins to cry, but the narrator watches her apathetically, “with the same lack of emotion, the same curiosity, as though I were watching a bug floating motionless down an irrigation ditch” (98).
The use of an insect as a representation of Marlene’s suffering is paralleled by the narrator’s nightmares in Chapter 16, specifically, the narrator’s dream of his mother birthing the duck, Amos. With this, the narrator represents his mother and Marlene as animals rather than human. Agnes, the narrator’s former lover, does not escape this objectification, operating throughout the text as an idea rather than an actual person. The narrator projects his own desire and ambition onto her, but when face-to-face with the real Agnes, he can’t access those emotions or any feeling towards her at all. She is only useful to him as a cypher and a concept, not in her humanity.
Winter in the Blood was published in 1974, a time of well-established gender-based discrimination in the United States. Some of the narrator’s thoughts on and treatment of women may be based in these deeply-rooted cultural attitudes, but his personal history is just as relevant. As mentioned in the thematic analysis of apathy as a response to trauma, the narrator claims to have only ever loved his brother and his father—both men. Though he tells his mother he does not blame her for his father’s absence, his thoughts about her betray the truth; he thinks she was emotionally withholding and was the cause of his father’s quest to find validation outside of the home. And it was this that First Raise was doing just before his death: seeking validation by making the white men of Dodson laugh.
The treatment of women in this novel is cold and sometimes cruel, with the narrator consciously inflicting pain in a way he does not with the men who appear in the story. Even the woman the narrator claims to want as a wife, Agnes, is treated callously and not acknowledged as a person. The narrator tells her she should settle down and complains about his own unhappiness, but he does not express any interest in Agnes’ feelings. He recognizes something in her, noting that her eyes “held the promise of warm things, of a spirit that went beyond her miserable life of drinking and screwing and men like me,” (86) but this is secondary to the narrator’s goal of turning her into the kind of woman he thinks she should be—a task on which he hangs the idea of the man he thinks he should be.
