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Walker Brothers Cowboy | Introduction

Alice Munro is one of Canada’s most renowned contemporary writers. Since the publication of her first volume, Dance of the Happy Shades in 1968, she has produced several important short story collections. Munro has been called a regional writer because many of her stories are set in rural Ontario during the Depression era, where Munro grew up, and evoke a bygone time of hardship and deprivation. Within this world, however, Munro’s central characters often hold on to their sense of wonder and mystery about the world around them, as does the narrator of ‘‘Walker Brothers Cowboy.’’ The family of the narrator—a young girl—has lost their fox farm, and her father has been forced to take a job peddling patent medicines, food flavorings, and poisons to the farmers who live in Ontario’s backcountry, but the girl still looks deeply at the ordinary world and finds enchantment in it. Like many of Munro’s works, ‘‘Walker Brothers Cowboy’’ also explores such universal themes as isolation, identity, and maturation.

Munro further delves into these issues in her collection Lives of Girls and Women, again from the point of view of the narrator of ‘‘Walker Brothers Cowboy.’’ This return to the narrator—Del Jordan—allows interested readers to more closely examine and follow one girl’s path to maturity, and observe how her unique way of looking at the world influences the choices that she makes. ‘‘Walker Brothers Cowboy,’’ however, also stands alone as a fine example of Munro’s skill as a writer and her concerns as a woman.

Walker Brothers Cowboy Summary

The story begins with the narrator describing a walk she takes with her father down to the banks of Lake Huron. They walk through town, passing the neighbor children, whom she does not know. They pass a deserted factory, a lumberyard, and junkyards. They enter a vacant lot that serves as a park where they sit and look at the water. Farther down, the narrator sees the part of the lake they used to visit before the family moved to Tuppertown from Dungannon. By the docks, instead of the farmers and their wives dressed in their Sunday best, they meet tramps, for whom her father rolls a cigarette. Her father tells her how the Great Lakes were formed, after the ice from the Ice Age retreated. The girl finds it impossible to imagine when this time existed—when dinosaurs roamed the earth. She can’t even imagine when Indians lived around the lake. She reflects on how short a period of time an individual inhabits the earth.

The story changes scene, and the narrator talks about her father’s job as a salesman for Walker Brothers. He goes from door to door in the back country, selling shampoos, medicines, teas, and poison. In Dungannon, the family had a fox farm, but they went bankrupt and were forced to move to Tuppertown, where her father found this job. The girl’s mother is clearly unhappy with their new poverty, and more so, with their fall from the dignity of owning a business to their... » Complete Walker Brothers Cowboy Summary