The Narrator's Perception Of Reality In Walker Brothers Cowboy, By Alice Munro

Through this passage, Munro outlines the narrator’s awareness of an alternative outcome of her father’s life, a change she is somewhat unwilling to accept. Munro follows the narrator’s perception of her father’s reality by utilizing landscape, placing it at the forefront, and connecting nature with past and present. The narrator comes to equate the familiarity of everyday life with her mother, the strange past with her father’s old flame Nora, and the uncertainty of the past with her father. In “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” Alice Munro links landscape and rich sensory detail with the narrator’s perception of reality, unfolding the narrator’s internal conflict between her comfort with the ordinary and familiar present, and accepting the strange and mysterious past. Munro connects the natural scenery and neutral color scheme of Tuppertown with

In the last passage, the narrator refers the “ordinary and familiar” to her intimate knowledge of her home life in Tuppertown, a life that is constant and uninterrupted. The narrator introduces the town’s setting in which the “street is shaded, in some places, by maple trees whose roots have cracked and heaved the sidewalk”(1). In choosing to present Tuppertown in relation to the maple tree’s roots, the narrator casts the town as a stable environment. Much like the maple roots that have cracked through the sidewalk, her sense of self and family is deeply embedded. The imagery of roots suggests both permanence and lack of movement, providing her a secure tie to the familiar. As the narrator approaches Tuppertown in the last scene, “the sky becomes overcast,” parallel to the earlier description of the town that is “grey in the evening, under a lightly overcast sky [with] no sunsets” (18, 2). The color of