Walker Brothers Cowboy

“After supper my father says, ‘Want to go down and see if the Lake’s still there?’”

The opening lines of the story introduce the symbol of the lake, which represents the narrator’s home (and her relationship to it). The short journey that the narrator takes with her father to the lake foreshadows the longer journey that she and her brother will take with him later in the story. These lines also establish the father as a central figure in the girl’s life and in the story.

“Then the town falls away in a defeated jumble of sheds and small junkyards, the sidewalk gives up and we are walking on a sandy path with burdocks, plantains, humble nameless weeds all around.”

Setting is an important literary device in Alice Munro’s writing, and in this story in particular. In these lines, Munro calls attention to the setting by personifying it. She states that it is “defeated” and “gives up,” and such descriptions are designed to echo the dire economic straits that characterized Great Depression. Thus, she also establishes a mood of fatigue and desperation and invokes a sense of poverty.

“I try to see that plain before me, dinosaurs walking on it, but I am not able even to imagine the shore of the Lake when the Indians were there, before Tuppertown. The tiny share of time we have appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquility.”

The narrator’s reaction to her father’s explanation of the way Lake Huron was formed shows her immature, child-like perspective on the world. This reaction stands in contrast to her perspective at the end of the story, once she has undergone a transformation that reflects