20th Century English Literature

Walker Brothers Cowboy

This story is about how a family goes through the time of depression. There are four members in this family – parents, a littlie girl and a little boy. Originally, they owned a fox farm in Dungannon. Later on, they move out to Tuppertown because the parents are embarrassed at their loss of fox farm, they stay away from fear of being questioned by old neighbors and friends. The father, Ben, is a salesman. The mother always stays in her imagination of good old days. One day, their father takes both of them out.

They go yard after another to sell their products. Later, the girl notices that they're not in their territory. Actually, their father is taking them to his old friend Nora's home. Over there, the girl finds the different life which her father had before. When they go home, the girl knows that there’re things not to be mentioned. Her brother won't tell, either, because he is too young
to notice anything.

Characters

Narrator

1. A very mature and helpful child.
2. A curious child who is trying to understand her place in life and comes to discover
the true person that her father is.
3. A very sensitive and clever girl.
4. A very good observer and she has very good awareness of human emotion.

BEN JORDAN (the father)

1. He is a salesman for Walker Brothers--a firm that sells almost entirely in the country. (2708)
2. A hard-working man that does all that he can to keep his family happy and fed.
3. He is very amusing and friendly.
4. He has very flexible attitude toward life.

MOTHER

1. A sorrowful woman who longs for her past home and life. She is a "disappointed, plaintive, somewhat snobbish mother that strives to maintain appearances" (2154).
2. She is vain and likes to keep her class and style.

LITTLE BOY

1. A sweet boy who doesn't seem to quite grasp the consequences of life.
2. He is too young to see all things that are going on around him.
3. He is insensitive and childish.

NORA

1. She is a friend from the past of the father’s.
2. A joyful woman that loves to dance. Her nature "wrapping me up in her strange gaiety" (2715).
3. She is a very charming woman.

Rites of Passage

The young girl who narrates the story experiences the most changes of all of the characters.

She has been sheltered from the world beyond her backyard for most of her childhood:
"my mother keeps my brother and me in our own yard, saying he is too young to leave it and I have to mind him." (2707)

Thus she occupies herself in such solitary ways as “planting pebbles in the dirt or writing in it with a stick." (2707)

When she leaves the house to accompany her father on a walk & on his Walker’s Brother route, she experiences a rite of separation.
--She leaves the familiar world (and the familiar self) and begins to seek out the unknown - later, in the car, she continues with this rite, since she rejoices in the houses becoming less familiar and she relishes the trip with "a rising hope of adventure" (2710).

In part, she examines universal questions, such as geological time:
-- "I try to see that plain [where Lake Huron now is] before me, dinosaurs walking on it, but I am not even able to imagine the shore of the Lake when the Indians were there, before Tuppertown" (2708).

She also becomes aware of how insignificant human time is in the face of geological time:
"The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquility. Even my father, who seems to have been at home in the world as long as it has lasted, has really lived on this earth only a little longer than I have . . . "(2708).

She experiences a sense of loss because she recognizes her father's mortality and her own:
"He was not alive when this century started. I will be barely alive--old, old--when it ends. I do not like to think of it. I wish the Lake to be always just a lake, with the safe-swimming floats marking it, and the breakwater and the lights of Tuppertown" (2708).

In addition to universal questions such as mortality, she comes to a greater understanding of the world outside her home; she begins to comprehend, for example, what poverty is—
she is aware that they are poor, but when her father meets the tramp, she hears him describe himself as "a bit hard up himself" (2708), thus aligning himself and his family with the destitute (the "factory with boarded-up windows" and the "bench with one slat missing" (2707), as well as the old family car, add immediacy to their poverty as well)

She experiences the human capacity for cruelty
When someone dumps the contents of a chamber pot onto her father's head; although she does not comment directly on this cruelty, she observes that her father is no longer whistling and must light a cigarette before he starts the car. (2712)

She comes to recognize the emotional suffering in the adult world
- She observes the tear falling down the face of the old lady who is blind. (2713)

She notices that Nora holds the towels "against her stomach as if it hurt" (2712)

She comes to recognize the bitter disappointment of Nora, whose laugh is "abrupt and somewhat angry" (2713) when she admits to the absence of a husband, and whose reference to time (too much of it!) is desolate (2716)

She watches Nora attempting to reclaim her youthful attachment to her father by changing her voice and her dress (2713), by laughing too hard at his stories (2714), and by urging him to dance with her; although she does transform her bleak existence temporarily (she experiences "great buoyancy" and "delight" (2716), the narrator knows that Nora cannot recreate that time (Nora does not remember the directions to their home)

The narrator engages in a rite of passage when she dances with Nora, coming into contact with not only the mature body of a woman (making her aware of her own imminent development) but also the longings of a single woman whose life has remained solitary and static (the narrator gets a glimpse into one possibility for her future (2715) (which Nora's sisters have offered). (2714)

She chooses to stay with the adults when her father urges her to play outside (in Nora’s house), again reinforcing her readiness to join the adult world, even if it remains somewhat mysterious to her (another sign that she is in a rite of transition) .

She moves into a rite of aggregation when she not only identifies prejudice against Nora for being a Catholic but also understands how cruel such prejudice is: "She digs with the wrong foot, I think, and the words seem sad to me as never before, dark, perverse" (2714, 2715).
- She decides that she must keep her father's secret (of visiting an old girlfriend and sharing laughter and whisky with her); she demonstrates that she has the discretion of an adult now.

She recognizes that her father's cheerful storytelling and jocular manner is a brave facade to cover his own disappointment in a less-than-fulfilling marriage and unsuccessful attempts to earn a living: "I feel my father's life flowing back from our car in the last of the afternoon, darkening and turning strange, like a landscape that has an enchantment on it, making it kindly, ordinary and familiar while you are looking at it, but changing it, once your back is turned, into something you will never know, with all kinds of weathers, and distances that you cannot imagine" (2717); she can no longer see him, as a child would, as an amusing "cowboy," but now sees him as a complicated adult.

* The protagonist's brother does not embark on the same rite of passage; he remains in childhood:
- He identifies himself as definitively childlike when he cannot see the Baptists whom his father imagines are being baptized at the Lake (2710).
- He laughs without empathy when the chamber pot is dumped on his father; for him, the gesture is merely entertainment.
- He is insensitive to his father's feelings on the way home, expecting him to sing as he always does.
- Neither the father nor the narrator is concerned about the possibility of his "telling"; they do not expect him to remember or comprehend the meeting with Nora.

Text

Munro, Alice. “Walker Brothers Cowboy.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M.H. Abrams, et al. 7th ed. Vol. 2. NY: Norton, 2000. 2707-17.

Reference

http://cfcc.net/ghurley/262/cowboy/index.html#summary