Winter In The Blood

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).