Walker Brothers Cowboy

Alice Munro 's Walker Brother 's Cowboy ' narrated from the perspective of young girl , focuses on the narrator 's initiation into a world that leaves her bewildered , uncertain of what she knows , how she has come to know what she knows , and how stable her knowledge is of the world she moves in . This sense of bewilderment is captured in the question her father asks as the story begins : 'Want to go down and see if the Lake 's still there ' With this seemingly casual question , Munro positions her narrator in a

world in which her own knowledge becomes increasingly evident . Is it possible , the reader is left to ask , if there exists a world in which a lake might exist one day and not the next

For the narrator , such a world is full of both moments of understanding and bewilderment . Seeing her travels with her father as an adventure ' the narrator begins the story bewildered by much of what she sees and hears , most notably with her father 's ironic detachment from the pressures of time that she feels of the financial pressures facing her family during the Depression , as her father acknowledges to a tramp of the horizons of human cruelty , as someone dumps a chamberpot on her father 's head and , most importantly , of the role of Nora in her father 's life

Gradually , though , she comes to understand that her sense of reality what she calls [t]he tiny share ' of the possibilities of life , is incomplete , and does not include a time . when automobiles and electric lights did not at least exist ' or when the land was a place that dinosaurs walked on . Having confronted this large bewilderment she begins to sense , though not necessarily understand , the significances of smaller things she sees , like the tear on the blind woman 's face and the loneliness and disappointment that dominates Nora 's life . And in the end , she comes to understand , too , how her father 's apparent tranquillity ' is a fazade , covering the disappointment of a life that has never amounted to what he hoped for . As the narrator admits , she comes to understand that once your back is turned ' for a moment , the world changes suddenly into something you will never know with all kinds of weathers , and distances you cannot imagine

Using a first-person narrator , rather than the all-knowing and therefore already mature eye of the omiscient speaker , Munro allows readers to see the process of maturation , the emergence from the enchantments of youth into the the never-understandable realities of a world of adulthood and change...