31 pages • 1 hour read
Alice MunroWalker Brothers Cowboy
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1972A 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 Disillusionment of Fading Childhood
The narrator’s loss of innocence, a classic theme in coming-of-age stories, plays a central role in the story, for her realizations about the hidden complexities of personal identity drive the plot of “Walker Brothers Cowboy.” The protagonist’s loss of innocence and growing disillusionment become most evident in her shifting perception of her father. In the opening pages, the protagonist holds the naïve belief that her father is as tranquil and steady as the lake. She does not realize that his past life differed greatly from his current circumstances, and this belief highlights her child-like conception of her father as unchanging. Like most children, she thinks about others mostly in relation to herself, rather than understanding that they have pasts that are unrelated to her.
The protagonist’s innocent view of people is also reflected in her oversimplified perception of her parents as precise opposites. This perspective is evident in the narrator’s tendency to compare and contrast key details about her parents, creating a false dichotomy between them. For example, after commenting on the clothes that her mother makes her wear when they leave the house together, the protagonist notes, “This is entirely different from going out after supper with my father” (Paragraph 8). Over the course of the story, however, the protagonist comes to the bittersweet realization that her parents are complicated humans with pasts and flaws. As she sheds her childhood illusions and looks upon the world with a more mature gaze, her loss of innocence is associated with the symbol of the lake and the socioeconomic struggles of the community of Tuppertown during the Great Depression. Thus, Alice Munro relates the complexities that inform each person’s life and identity.
The narrative implies that people’s lives and identities are formed by their surroundings and by their pasts. As “Walker Brothers Cowboy” is the first story in the collection Dance of the Happy Shades, this important transformation from innocence into maturity paves the way for the rest of the stories in the collection, which deal with the progression of similar themes.
The Bittersweet Effects of Nostalgia
The tension in “Walker Brothers Cowboy” is more than the conflict between the young protagonist’s perception of reality and the actual complexity of the world. She and the other characters must also deal with the pressure of memory and the influence of the past on their present circumstances. Different characters respond to that influence in different ways and experience widely contrasting results. For example, the protagonist’s mother is frozen by pride and bitterness that come from regretting the ways in which the present fails to resemble the past. On the other hand, Ben and Nora embrace their memories in a more positive way, while still acknowledging life’s complexities.
The characters in “Walker Brothers Cowboy” are living through a time of great change and social upheaval. The Great Depression (1929-1939) caused many Canadian families like the Jordans to lose their incomes and to leave their homes or communities in search of any work they could find. In the case of the Jordans, they fortunately did not have to move very far from their former home; they are now living in a new neighborhood on the outskirts of Tuppertown because it is more affordable. They have had to give up their fox farm, which failed to provide enough income for the family, and the author injects these details to highlight the fact that the family has experienced a downturn in their collective fortunes, as many families did during this time frame. The protagonist’s mother takes this change particularly hard, for the narrator states:
Fate has flung us onto a street of poor people (it does not matter that we were poor before, that was a different sort of poverty), and the only way to take this, as [my mother] sees it, is with dignity, with bitterness, with no reconciliation (Paragraph 7).
Rather than adjusting to the new norm in their neighborhood, the mother insists on dressing up in their Sunday best to go grocery shopping. Her dissatisfaction and pride even give her headaches, leading her to stay home while her husband and children go driving. She smiles only slightly at Ben’s jokes and tries to draw her unwilling daughter into conversations about their past.
In stark contrast to the mother’s essential paralysis over her memories, Ben and Nora use their memories of the past to spur new activity and even joy. Although Nora’s reception of Ben is a mixture of pleasure and pain, they end up sharing a pleasant afternoon together. Significantly, the visit is portrayed with more sensory detail than any other scene in the story, an approach that illustrates the importance of these interactions to the author’s primary message. Similarly, Munro uses key details to imply worlds of unspoken truth and regret, and this stylistic choice becomes particularly evident when Nora’s blind mother sheds a tear upon meeting Ben’s children. This single detail implies the woman’s unstated regret that the children she meets are not her own grandchildren, and that Ben has chosen to go in a separate direction from her daughter, Nora. Within this context, the lonely nature of the house represents Nora’s understated sadness over the life that could have been but now will never be.
Finding Solace in Companionship
Love and companionship are at the heart of “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” the primary purpose of which is to highlight the fragmented and imperfect views that people often hold of one another. In the story, the characters’ pasts, their desires, and even their secrets work to either isolate them from others or bring them closer together, and the happiest moments of the story are those in which the characters celebrate each other’s company. The story therefore investigates what happens when people (like the protagonist’s mother) let their longings and pain obstruct their relationships with their loved ones, and it also highlights the efforts of people (like Ben) who take risks to establish strong ties of companionship.
One of the strongest examples of companionship in the story is the relationship between the protagonist and her father. They share a closeness that is evident from the first page, when Ben invites his daughter to take a walk. In the early moments of the story, Ben also extends kindness unequivocally to everyone around him and makes it a point to teach his daughter about the geological history of their region. His whimsical driving songs also highlight his openness to life and love, and in every scene of the story, he uses kindness, humor, and music to form connections with the people around him. Near the end of the story, after the Jordans have left Nora’s house, the trust and companionship between father and daughter is deepened. The protagonist understands “just from the thoughtfulness, the pause when he passes the licorice, that there are things not to be mentioned” (Paragraph 106). Her connection with her father is strong enough that he does not need to say anything for her to see that he has shared something important with her that should not be shared with her mother.
The other side of that trust and confidence between father and daughter is the isolation of the mother, who is not included in the special afternoon that Ben shares with Nora and the children. The mother is isolated by her pride and grief at having lost their previous way of life, and she is also isolated by her prejudice, which makes her want to set herself apart from her impoverished neighbors. The mother’s isolating pride is also evident while the protagonist is at Nora’s house, for when she deduces that Nora is Catholic, she recalls how her mother’s family behaved toward Catholics, saying unkindly that Catholics “dig with the wrong foot” (Paragraph 73). A few pages later, the narrator notes that those “words seem sad to me as never before, dark, perverse” (Paragraph 106). That darkness stands in strong contrast to the unspoken closeness that she and her father have established, and the brightness that is present in the companionship with Nora.
Through the behaviors of the three main adult characters in the story (Ben, the mother, and Nora), Munro explores the spectrum of isolation and companionship. The story ultimately rewards the characters who take risks to foster connections, while the habits of the mother are associated with images of pain and darkness.
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