Literary Criticism: Winter in the Blood

Bones through tone: Storytelling methods in James Welch’s Winter in the Blood

Winter. The word has the ability to depict a scene, tone, and vivid image with just one word. In James Welch’s novel, Winter in the Blood, words are stitched together in short poetic phrases that create a tone and feeling. This short, choppy prose style gives the novel the atmosphere of brevity and bleakness. Welch’s prose style utilizes the short sentence structure to produce an overarching tone to the novel; however, this tone is independent of the seemingly random literal meanings of the text. If the novel is read literally, and not tonally, many scenes do not make sense and have no real reason to be included in the text, but they provide a substantial tone to that section that is integral to understanding the overall sullen and bleak tone of the novel. This indicates that language has some power over the tone and importance on seemingly random events, and when stitched together they are sullen and dark in tone.

Welch opens the novel with a poem focused on the corporal aspect of human life. This preface poem serves as a tonal gauge for the rest of the novel. The poem states, “Bones should never tell a story to a bad beginner…Dirt is where dreams must end” (Welch xv). Composed by Welch, this poem is about Earthboy calling him from his dreams. The poem can be read as a preface that introduces the novel to all readers, not just Native American readers. The bad beginners would be readers that are unfamiliar with the Native American culture and history, and Welch argues that bones, should not tell stories to these people. As a poem, bones can be interpreted as a metaphor for horror, violence, or death. So instead of telling a story through the eyes of horror, Welch wishes to tell a whole story through a feeling and a tone, not literal events. This is why opening with a poem is so significant. In poetry, tone, language, and musicality are more important than literal meaning and description. Welch’s novel spends little time focusing on literal events and describing the horrors that Native American tribes have endured; instead, the novel focuses on feeding an earthy tonal tinge of darkness to readers through poetry, but within the framework of a prose novel.

The phrase “dirt is where dreams must end” immediately comments on the following opening scene of the novel. The narrator is depicted urinating in a “borrow pit.” This is a place where the earth has literally been removed and where “the Earthboys were gone” (Welch 1).

One might read this urination as humorous when looked at literally, but the tone and the language of the scene does not amplify the humor. There are only comical scenes when the novel is read at a literal level, which is part of this novel’s unique commentary. Reading at a literal level is laughable, while absorbing tone and mood the novel is read at a deeper and more sensible level. It is easy to misconstrue dark events into dark humorous events; other people’s misery is easier to laugh because it seems so absurd. Yet, when language displays a more somber tone independent of the literal scene, a deeper connection and bond is formed between text and reader. Welch makes a conscious choice to write in this poetic prose style instead of detailing the events of a tragedy. His narrator describes coming home as “a torture” instead of explaining torturous details (1). The ambiguity allows for a tone of torture to be distributed instead of a depiction of torture which could be laughable on a literal level. The narrator describes the Earthboy place with images of skeletons and tumbleweeds “stark as bone” (1). Without telling readers the horror that constituted in the disappearance of the Earthboys, and the soil, the narrator implies that the area is tainted with tinges of death and darkness. These tonal colors become more important than the literal, and comical, events that occur.

In addition to the poetic tone of the novel, the choppy sentence structure also contributes to the novel’s somber tone. A majority of the sentences follow the most simple pattern in English; subject, verb, then prepositional phrase. This pattern is basic and creates a hollow, colorless feeling. The narrator says, “We buried the old lady the next day” (Welch 136). This sentence provides no remorse, sadness, or any emotion. The constructed sentence only serves the purpose of explaining exactly what happened. If language is used in this basic form, hollowness arises. Fundamentally language is apathetic, but people aren’t. Welch is telling a story through the perspective of a narrator, who is telling a story through empty language. Welch purposefully creates this empty tone as a commentary on language itself. On the literal level, the burial scene in the epilogue is quite humorous; the hole is too small for the coffin to fit into, so it slants in crookedly; but, Welch does not over exaggerate the details to make the reader laugh. Instead, the scene continues in short sentences heavy in tone or nonsensical. The narrator describes, “The air was heavy with yesterday’s rain. It would probably be good for fishing” (137). What does the air being heavy have to do with fishing, and why is this even mentioned at a funeral? There is almost no reason for such and interjection, and this shows that language can be very pointless at times. No matter how descriptive or lack of details one provides, language is futile effort to portray something as dark and bleak as the slow disappearance of Native American culture.

Language can be flat, flowery, or nonsensical, and that contributes to its micro insignificance, but when collected into a larger poem or story, the macro message that resonates with readers is the tone. Welch’s novel argues that it is very hard to tell a literal story in small snippets of language, but through that construction and through poetic metaphors, Welch is able to tell a sullen historical story only through tone. This meta story is explained with minimal description and context; it is merely the story of the dissolving of the children of the earth, the Native Americans, into the dominant American culture. This tale is much longer and more drawn out than could be handled in a novel of this length; however, this novel’s tone captures the overall wintery tone of the event, while providing insight into the history of the Blackfeet and the troubles they faced over a century ago. The narrator speaks about the historical Blackfeet, “They rejected the idea of going home because the soldiers were there” (Welch 123). This information parallels the narrator’s loathing of going home at the opening of the novel. Home has been overrun with torturous qualities of American society. The winter that is described that the Blackfeet endured is applicable in tone to the continuation of the winter that Native Americans are facing, many are starving, some are marginalized, and it always involves a mixing of blood lines. In this instance, the tone is a product of literal interpretation of what occurred during that winter.

Welch’s use of tone to tell the story has more impact than straightforward storytelling. The novel does not have to follow a linear or logical pathway, and therefore is able to use language’s absurdities to the advantage of telling the story. In the fiction novel tradition, storytelling is heavily reliant on details, conciseness, and clarity to tell a story. Welch’s Winter in the Blood flips this paradigm on its head. The novel instead uses flowery descriptions to amplify a tone, extends the tone through sentence structure, and applies this tone to a unique Native American struggle. Through this different and more poetic style of storytelling, Welch is able emote a response in readers through their emotions rather than their ethical matrices. This makes readers arrive at a conclusion without having to even think about the issue, the issue is never mentioned, but it is force fed to readers via language construction. The novel provides original commentary on the arbitrary nature of prose language while using poetry to deliver this message. Prose is the method in which bones tell stories, in an inorganic, untraditional way. Through poetry, bones are not telling the story, nonsense is, but the dark and somber way the nonsense is arranged makes a huge difference. If the arbitrary language portrays a tone of bleakness, then the reader will feel the bleak nature of the “bones.” The novel literally buries bones in the epilogue; however, the poetic structure of novel states that “dirt is where dreams must end.” The novel begins with an absence of earth, and the novel ends with bones being covered in dirt, but the tone of the novel does not demonize the violent larceny of earth or condone the repression of the bones of Native American history; instead, the novel’s tone expresses a deep and overwhelming wallow that cannot be expressed in literal language, only felt through tonal and subvert implications.

Works Cited

Welch, James. Winter in the Blood. New York, NY, U.S.A.: Penguin, 1986. Print.