Winter's Bone Dolly

1005 Words5 Pages
In the world today, not many teenagers can say that they dropped out of high school to take care of their family. In the book, Winter's Bone, Daniel Woodrell expresses a young girl's strenuous journey to fight for her family. Ree Dolly had to make numerous sacrifices to take care of her family while holding responsibilities of her father's corrupt actions. Although relating with Ree Dolly's lifestyle is generally a challenge, Daniel Woodrell’s creative use of imagery and literary techniques help readers find a sense of companionship with her. Instead of bluntly writing out Ree’s series of emotions, Woodrell uses the scenery around her to convey it. When Ree wakes up the next morning in the cave after she visited Thump Milton, she faces the…show more content…
“Hillsides knit with ice came apart. Ice slipped from everything, limb, twig, stump, rock, and cascaded chinking to ground” (Woodrell, 70). In this scene, the movement of the ice represents the time that was running out. The risk of her family getting kicked out of the house was growing imminent. “She was strangely still and staring still and staring on the bridge until she understood that her eyes searched for a body beneath that ice, and she crouched to her knees and cried, cried until tears ran down her chest” (Woodrell, 70). Her instinctive search for Jessup’s body states her desire to move forward and find Jessup’s body. Her frustration with the inability to do anything was shown through her outburst. She asked everyone that might know where her father’s location was, but ended up with nothing. She feels exasperated in herself for being helpless while time was ticking by. Another scene where Woodrell uses the nature around her to express her emotion was when she was out on a walk with her…show more content…
From the start, Jessup is described as a criminal, which helps readers feel a stronger emotion from Ree’s positive reminiscences with her father. Even though Jessup abandoned the family, he wasn’t always like this. ”Ree'd learned to shoot on these very weapons, trained in the fields by Dad, and had a deep fondness for them because of that" (Woodrell, 79). This memory shows Jessup in the past when he was involved with his family. Ree has a pleasant remembrance of him teaching how to shoot a gun. Since readers were constantly shown the amoral side of Jessup, the contrast between him in the past and the present sparks their
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