Love/belonging, Esteem, and Self-actualization.

This was originally meant to be a comment on Mom’s “Winter in the Blood-Chapter 1-PT. 1” post but I’ll stoke my own importance and make it its own new self aggrandizing post. Here we go.

“My throat ached with a terrible thirst.” This quote is a simple but so very deep summary of what Winter in the Blood is about. It shows we the reader the deep longing that our narrator has within his soul. He is searching for a basic satisfaction of human needs, to find who he is, to fill his soul with something that it is missing. What he is missing is a connection to his Native ancestors and history, the world (as in mother nature) and especially a connection to himself and self-knowing. These are basic satisfactions of needs on the beginning levels of Maslow that are not being met. The narrators feeling of emptiness is indescribable like a thirst is indescribable, what biologically satisfies it does not matter, you will know when you are satisfied and you will know when you are not. An attempt is made to quench this thirst but with the wrong solution... poison that does not provide sustenance, only superficial relief... alcohol.

Winter in the Blood has many references to water and to liquid. These are always negative references when they concern the narrator but are positive when they involve non-Native Americans. The clearest example has to do with the silty Milk (white) River that provides an abundance of fish for the white men but nothing for the Native Americans. In fact, the narrator cannot even see fish or even believe that there are fish in the river while the whites receive sustenance and prosperity from the river easily. The narrator cannot function in the world, so much so that it is not possible for him to provide for himself from it and it hardly provides the basic elements of survival for the Natives. Again, alcohol is its offering. Everything that they get is through struggle and usually results in pain.

There are more water examples than I can list or have time to search for at this point but the dry, cracked, gumbo flats are one example, summarizing the world that the NA’s live in. Another that I like is Yellow Calf’s well. He is still somewhat connected to the old ways of the Natives and maintains his communication with the old world but his pure life is still being corrupted and influenced by the new world... his well is cloudy, but at least it doesn’t provide alcohol. A new thought comes to mind; I wonder what the fact that Yellow Calf makes bitter coffee with the water has to do with things? Also, the little girl in the narrators car ride that gets sick from the water is interesting. She seems to be Native, which I reason from her father having a beaded headband and cannot drink the water without getting sick. Things are getting worse for the youth.

The narrators relationship to liquid is a metaphor for his search for meaning in life like a need that needs to be satisfied like thirst and the disappointment that this search has created for him. His methods for understanding the world are incompatible with the modern world. They create a distance that makes it hard for him to to understand how life works and therefore hard to be successful at finding meaning and happiness. His perceptions are different from the perceptions of those around him even though they witness the same things. They probably both create and result from the distance he makes and experiences in his life. The differences in realities is very visible in the strange, Richard Brautigan-esque and magical realist occurrence of the rivers and reservoirs being full of fish for the white man but completely bleak to the narrator that was mentioned earlier. It is not that he is unlucky at fishing, he cannot see the fish at all and does not believe that they are even there. For the whites the water is prosperous, for him, desolate. He is on a separate, unfortunately lower, plane of existence. He also feels that his father never got anything accomplished in life but is then directly contradicted by his mother who says that he must be confused. These are both instances of the author showing the narrators disconnection from the world. This is done, I think, to show the position of the Native Americans in the modern world. They have different perspectives that do not work in the new reality. The narrator is a symbol for all NA’s.

This novel is bleak. Its desolation, hopelessness, and misunderstandings shrivel any positive emotion in the reader like a drop of water sizzling through the sand of a scorched riverbed on a summer day. The feeling is a dryness in your mouth, sucking away hope like bone dry dust. The mother horse and her colt in the first part of the novel offer promise and the possibilities that come with new life but at 100 pages in and from the title of the book I doubt that things are going to turn around. What can be seen as positive is the authors beautiful prose which is lush and nourishing as well as the knowledge of alternate perspectives that come with reading the novel. When we know pain we can better work to and then appreciate happiness. blah blah blah.