52 pages • 1 hour read
Larry WatsonMontana 1948
Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 1993A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Air and Breathing
The first image in the book is the sound of Marie coughing. She is sick and having trouble breathing. She may have pneumonia. Later on she is murdered, perhaps by being smothered by a pillow.
When she feels stressed, David’s mother longs for the wind that sweeps across the plains of her native North Dakota. It is the thought of the air and the air in motion that helps her to let go of the tension she is feeling.
The clearest use of the symbols of air and breathing are in relation to David himself: “As I had so often been advised by my parents, I never believed any of my grandmother’s supernatural stories. Until the day Marie died. That night I lay in bed and couldn’t breathe. The room felt close, full, as though someone else was getting the oxygen I needed” (Chapter 2, p. 87). Marie’s death literally takes his breath away.
At the climax of the book, David’s mother fires a shotgun, and the shot symbolically changes the atmosphere: “The air seemed instantly altered, turned foul, the stuff of rank, black chemical smoke and not he sweet, clean oxygen we daily breathed” (Chapter 3, p. 130).
The author plays on the reader’s expectation that the air in the open spaces of Montana will be clean and clear. When the people who live there face extreme stress, the very air and their breathing patterns change. Their inner struggles are reflected in their breathing the air around them.
Guns and Firearms
The shotgun blast, mentioned above, signals the climax of the novel. Moreover, the symbolism of guns and firearms pervades the whole story.
David considers his father a man too weak to be sheriff, in part because Wesley Hayden does not carry a gun. Sheriff Hayden keeps the small gun he owns in a dresser drawer.
David has another role model when it comes to using firearms. David’s grandfather does carry a gun, and even the threat of his using it carries weight.
David himself releases stress by firing his .22 and killing a bird with his firearm.
Len, the deputy sheriff, also carries a gun, a properly large .44 or .45, which he uses to fend off the cowboys sent by Julian Hayden. In this instance, the gun symbolizes strength and is used to protect a woman and child from attack.
Guns and firearms are fully integrated into the culture of the West as depicted in the novel. They can be used both positively and negatively. They are an outlet for all kinds of emotions, including anger, fear, stress, and love.
House and Home
Initially, the novel employs the symbol of the family home in a conventional way. David comes home after school and expects to find the housekeeper Marie at home to care for him until his mother gets home from work.
Marie, however, is ill. Sickness has entered David’s normally safe haven. Then the situation gets much, much worse.
Marie is murdered in the house, and David feels the presence of death there. David’s father arrests his uncle and locks him in the basement of the house. The Haydens’ home has become a jail.
After the cowboys threaten to break into their home, David’s mother insists that her husband let his prisoner go so that she can once again feel safe in her home.
After Uncle Frank commits suicide in the basement, the house is further tainted by violent death, and the family sells it and moves away.
Thus, the Haydens’ home symbolizes all of the troubles they experience in the novel. They start out safe in their home, and their safe haven is compromised and destroyed during the story.
Town and Wilderness
David sees the town as a civilized environment that limits his freedom. He spends as much time as possible outside the town away from everything that alienates him from community life. In David’s mind, the town “stood for social order, good manners, the chimed schedules of school and church. It was a world meant for storekeepers, teachers, ministers, for the rule-makers, the order-givers, the law-enforcers”.
David is a growing adolescent: he wants to be free of his parents and free of all influences that tie him down.
In the important sequence when David goes out into the countryside from his grandparents’ house, he is at his wildest. He shoots his gun at everything and kills a magpie.
Burial and Graves
When David kills the bird, he makes a point of burying it. He hides what he is ashamed of so others cannot see it.
In a more symbolic way, David’s father hides his criminal brother in the basement rather than taking him to jail where everyone in town can see what is happening. His confinement in the basement foreshadows Frank’s impending death and burial underground. When Uncle Frank commits suicide, the family hides his body so only the undertaker will see his slashed wrists.
Frank’s actual grave represents a chasm in the family with a literal gulf between David and his parents on one side and David’s grandparents and Frank’s wife on the other side.
David
David is the only character in the novel with a biblical name. By calling his protagonist and narrator David, the author suggests parallels with the ancient character of David.
The biblical David is given credit for writing the Book of Psalms, which, in part, records the history of his people. The narrator David writes the history of his family and his community.
David first appears in the Bible as a young man who fights and slays the giant, Goliath, against all odds. The biblical David came of age on the battlefield. In the novel, David comes of age in the Wild West, where violent death makes life like a battlefield.
