Alienation and Broken Narrative in "Winter in the Blood"

Abstract

The narrator of James Welch's Winter in Blood suffers malaise of modern man; he is alienated from his family, his community, his land, and his own past. He is ineffective in relationships with people and at odds with his environment, not because he is deliberately rebellious, or even immaturely selfish, but because he has lost story of who he is, where he has come from. Welch's narrator is an American Indian, but one who suffers more than tensions of living on margins of conflicting societies. He is an Indian who has lost both tribal identification and personal identity because he is cut off from tradition of oral narration which shapes consciousness, values, and self-worth. He is a man whose story is confused, episodic, and incomplete because he has never received story of those who came before and invested landscape and people with significance and meaning. Storytelling keeps things going, creates a cultural matrix that allows a continuum from past to present and future; but for deliberately nameless narrator of Winter in Blood, there is no past, no present, and certainly no future, only chaos of disconnected memories, desperate actions, and useless conversation. His dilemma is clear from beginning of novel. Welch is blunt as he reveals barrenness of narrator's perceptions of himself and his environment. As he walks toward his mother's ranch narrator reflects, Coming home was not easy anymore (p. 2). The land he crosses is empty and abandoned: the Earthboys were gone (p. 1). The ranch buildings have caved in. Even at this own ranch, there is a sense of emptiness, especially in his relationships with his family: 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 years (p. 2). In fact, he reveals he no longer has feelings even about himself. There is little for him to feel but pain. His injured knee aches; he is bruised and hung over; his woman has run off, taking his rifle and razor; his mother is