Revisioning Childhood: Memory and the Senses in Alice Munro’s ”Walker Brothers Cowboy”

Walker Brothers Cowboy, a brief story written by Alice Munro, presents the pivotal (and maybe formative) knowledge of a young, unnamed, female narrator. Munroe filters the girl’s visual and olfactory-enriched memories via the present tense thoughts of a markedly matured voice, creating a nostalgic impact which foregrounds the significance of this childhood story to the narrator. A “warm night” filled with “cracked sidewalks” and the sound of “A extremely quiet, washing noise on the stones of the beach” (p. two) greet the reader these descriptions are the substance of the narrator’s globe, in Walker Brothers Cowboy. It is critical that Munro creates a substantial, three-dimensional world, noticed from the viewpoint of this young, somber girl. ‘Seen’ is certainly the crucial word here. The sensory effects illustrated are primarily visual, to present the reader with a lucid and inviting reality. Not only is the established setting established more solidly and created less difficult to enter, but also the piercing visual descriptions of the narrator reveal her pre-adolescent point of view of discovery and lucidity. Here, the narrator interprets a central theme in Munro’s writing visually: “Children, of their own will, draw apart, separate into islands of two or one below the heavy trees, occupying themselves in such solitary approaches as I do all day…” (p. two) Even though the twin themes of solitude and intimacy are only indirectly connected to memory in Walker Brothers Cowboy, the narrator’s penetrating visual portrayal of each and every of them right here is important. From this instance, it is evident how the reader can access the heart of the story. With out these sprinklings of sensory metaphors and interpretation, the story would be a significantly dimmer, two-dimensional construct. For, instead of describing a perfectly linear plot via a straightforward first person narrative, Munro takes care to sketch her story fluidly. She tends to make little hops across occasions and spaces to illustrate the characters, setting and mood, but usually staying within the confines of present-tense 1st individual to limit and define the story. Simply because Munro’s writing style opens so a lot of tiny possibilities, like pricks of sunlight that come by means of a straw hat, (p. 7) the reader must be able to enter the story on even terms with the narrator. Munro’s scattered sensory descriptions and metaphors draw the reader’s empathy towards the narrator really properly. When the reader is able to view and interpret the narrator’s globe from her point of view, the idea of memory comes into play. The narrator, unlike her brother, can access these events through her memory. “No worry about my brother, he does not notice enough.”(p.11) Descriptions such as “little drops form along her upper lip, hang in the soft black hairs at the corner of her mouth,” (p. ten) which contrast the narrator and her brother, infuse the story with nostalgia. The perspective and feelings behind her memories are exposed, like a developing photograph, for reader and future versions of the narrator herself to examine. Hints of nostalgia are also present all through the piece in the narrator’s formal, developed diction. While all of the narrator’s reactions and feelings are accurate for a young girl, her wealthy descriptions are reminiscent of an older, mature lady who is remembering an crucial previous occasion. Nostalgia is also referenced inside of the story. On web page three, her father describes the flow of icecaps with his hand in the snow. The narrator becomes uncomfortable in the twist of thoughts provoked by these vast passages of time: does entropy creep into every little thing? Entropy, an critical aspect of nostalgia, is confronted by Munro, although subtly. The narrator admits: “I want the Lake to be often just a lake,” (p. 3) Conveying each a longing for an unchanging planet and the impossibility of that longing. Even so, there is a single location the lake will be undisturbed by entropy. The lake, “with the protected-swimming floats marking it, and the breakwater and the lights of Tuppertown,” (p. 3) does exist, unchangeable and invulnerable to time, within the communication of the story. Although any real location is susceptible to time, this fictional construct will live through Munro’s writing, within the narrator’s, and of course reader’s imagination and memory. The tension amongst the narrator’s mother and father, who represent a lot of the narrator’s globe, contrast far more than just their character. It emphasizes two different approaches of searching at the previous, two sorts of remembering. One particular agonizes over the previous, lost in entropy or misfortune or time, and a single creates fond memories in the present, regarding the past with serenity. Her father would develop snatches of song which incite the narrator to laughter and pleasant memory. Whereas the narrator’s mother straight relates to presently felt nostalgia several occasions in the story: “Do you remember when we put you in your sled and Key pulled you?”. (p. 4) The narrator’s father sees the present with great humour, modesty, and an accepting, easygoing nature. Her mother looks at the present circumstance “with dignity, with bitterness, with no reconciliation,” (p. three). The disparity amongst parents is sharply and humorously defined in the occurrence, and later retelling of the “pee” incident. While the father later retells the event as an anecdote, built up for comic effect, he hushes the kids on page four, saying: “’Just don’t tell your mother that…she is not liable to see the joke.’” Lastly, in the finish of the story, the shocking realization seems that her mother and father represent two sides to the exact same coin. The family’s past was lost, buried beneath alter like the dinosaurs had been buried under ice. Yet of course it nevertheless exists, in her father’s memory, and now in the narrator’s, and reader’s as properly. The narrator connects the imagery of glaciers and her father’s newfound previous in the last web page, using the metaphor of a landscape, with “All kinds of weathers, and distances you can not imagine.” (p. 11) Munro has beautifully sculpted a significant transitional period in this young woman’s life, exalting the tiny observations to the point of nostalgia. She reaches a climax, and a thoughtful resolution with handful of, and tiny plot events. With an introspective narrator, Munro is capable to implant sensory particulars in the reader, and illuminate the moment of realization in a way with which the reader can empathize with and comprehend. Source: Munro, Alice. Walker Brothers Cowboy. The Norton Anthology of Literature: The Twentieth Century. Volume F. 2nd Edition. Ed. Sarah Lawall and Maynard Mack. W.W Norton & Co. New York and London, 2002.3010-3020.