31 pages • 1 hour read
Alice MunroWalker Brothers Cowboy
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1972A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Unnamed Protagonist
While the protagonist is unnamed, she is clearly a dynamic character and a school-age girl. As the narrator of the story, she primarily relates events from her childhood perspective, although the narrative voice sometimes includes interjections from the perspective of an older, more mature voice, indicating an occasional retrospective view of the story’s events. Over the course of the story, the young protagonist realizes that her father has a past and an internal life that she never knew about. While she is initially uncomfortable with this thought, she eventually comes to accept that there are some things about her loved ones that she might never fully understand. This shift in perspective represents a classic coming-of-age transformation that highlights The Disillusionment of Fading Childhood.
Although the protagonist is observant and self-aware, her youth and lack of exposure to the world also make her naïve. She is frank and honest, acknowledging her own fears and inconsiderate moments, as when she notes that she is “frightened of tramps” (Paragraph 5). Like Alice Munro herself, the protagonist is growing up in rural Ontario, Canada, and her family is suffering from the economic impacts of the Great Depression; concerns about poverty and class status are strongly present in the story as a whole.
Ben Jordan
Ben Jordan is the protagonist’s father. He is a static character who does not experience an internal transformation through the events of the plot. However, he is a round character, for Munro deepens the protagonist’s understanding of him by revealing startling information about his past relationship with Nora Cronin. Ben is the titular “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” a door-to-door salesman for the Walker Brothers company. As an archetype, cowboys are capable and hands-on characters who respond to challenges with confidence and a bit of swagger or humor, and their cross-country wanderings also imbue them with an air of wistful loneliness and wry wisdom. Ben fits well into this archetype, even though he isn’t a cowboy by profession.
As the story progresses, Ben reveals his playful side by making up songs about his work and using his sense of humor to connect with his wife, children, and Nora. He is also essentially kind and treats all people equally, speaking as courteously to the unhoused people by the lake as he does to his own neighbors. The complexity of Ben’s character develops the theme of The Bittersweet Effects of Nostalgia, and his choice to introduce his children to Nora leads the protagonist to her own realizations of how profoundly past events and memories can shape the present moment.
Mother
The protagonist’s mother, Ben’s wife, is not named in the story. She is a secondary, round character and acts as a foil to Nora (the other adult woman in the story, who was in a relationship with Ben prior to his marriage to the protagonist’s mother). The protagonist’s mother is so proud that she isolates herself from the poorer community in which the effects of the Great Depression have forced her to live. Because her pride has been bruised by the family’s poverty, she dresses in her best clothes just to walk to the grocery store, and her unstated stress causes her to be plagued by headaches. She likes to reminisce with her daughter about the past, and in this way, her characterization is also important in developing the theme of The Bittersweet Effects of Nostalgia, for her obsession with the past prevents her from embracing the present.
The protagonist’s mother therefore isolates herself from her community by keeping her children at home and only speaking to one neighbor. She also isolates herself from her husband by staying home rather than riding with him and the children on his sales rounds. As such, her character establishes the price of not Finding Solace in Companionship, for her inner misery is a deliberate choice. Rather than joining her husband in his humorous approach to the family’s situation, she responds to Ben’s jokes by reassuring her children and smiling only reluctantly. She does not welcome or respond to his humor as enthusiastically as his children and Nora choose to do.
Nora Cronin
Nora is a secondary character who serves as a foil to the protagonist’s mother. Whereas the mother opts to stay at home and isolate herself, Nora is lively and vivacious. Nora also values the way she looks, as is shown when she changes into a nice dress when the Jordans show up at her house. Finding Solace in Companionship is something she is quite willing to do, as her warm welcome of Ben and his children demonstrates. Despite the implicit awkwardness of her past romance with Ben, she shows herself to be companionable and welcoming, longing to dance with Ben and laughing eagerly at his jokes.
Nora lives with her elderly mother and is not married. The narrative implies that she was in a relationship with Ben before he was married, and her lingering romantic interest in Ben is apparent when she applies perfume and puts on high heels and a nice dress when he arrives. The characters’ comfortable and affectionate familiarity is also apparent, as is her wistfulness over their shared history when she asks him to dance and he gently declines. Most notably, Nora’s unarticulated feelings of regret (and perhaps resentment) are implied when Munro describes her as speaking “cheerfully and aggressively,” and laughing in a way that is “abrupt and somewhat angry” (Paragraphs 45 and 39). Although Nora’s encounter with Ben and his children is complex, the overall tone is positive, and she is genuinely sorry to see them go. This complexity and affection develop the theme of The Bittersweet Effects of Nostalgia and help the protagonist to reach her transformative realization at the end of the story.
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By Alice Munro
