73 pages • 2 hours read
Daniel WoodrellWinter's Bone
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2006A 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.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
Ree nurses her brothers, who have developed colds, with whiskey and honey. Sonya, Blond Milton’s wife, comes to the house with a box of food and promises that she will ask someone to replenish their supply of wood. As Ree receives the food, she observes Sonya’s open dislike of her mother, due to her mother’s affair with Blond Milton that produced Sonny. Sonya inquires about Baskin’s presence at the house earlier in the afternoon and if Ree had any information about her father. Ree only responds that she would not have told the deputy anything even if she had information. As she prepares to leave, Sonya wonders aloud why the deputy talked to Ree a week before Jessup was required to be at court. After Sonya’s departure, Ree and her brothers sort through the box of food. Ree promises to prepare deer stew for the night if the boys watch and learn how to make it as well.
Chapter 5 Summary
Ree begins her search for her father by visiting her intimidating Uncle Teardrop, who lives down the creek. Uncle Teardrop received his epithet from the three tattooed teardrops falling from his scarred face, which were rumored to signify three gruesome acts he had accomplished in prison. As Ree approaches the house, Victoria, Uncle Teardrop’s wife, greets her. Victoria was once Uncle Teardrop’s third wife and is currently his fifth; she is also Ree’s favorite Dolly woman besides her mother.
Ree enters their house and notes the gun resting beside a bag of marijuana and meth on the kitchen table. Uncle Teardrop overhears Ree’s account of her situation to Victoria and tells her that she should not look for her father because “where a man’s at ain’t necessarily for you to know” (24). Ree persists in her questioning, despite Victoria’s attempts to change the topic and Uncle Teardrop’s intimidating show of playing with his gun. When Ree suggests that she visit the neighboring town of Hawkfall, where the Dollys have distant kin, Uncle Teardrop tells her that it would be dangerous to visit that isolationist town. Despite Ree’s assertion that Uncle Teardrop should help his only brother, he remains unmoved and refuses to look into Jessup’s whereabouts. He kisses Ree’s forehead while grasping her throat menacingly before disappearing to the bedroom. Victoria attempts to placate him, but she merely returns with fifty dollars from Teardrop to help with the bills and sends Ree home.
Chapter 6 Summary
As Ree walks home from Teardrop’s house, she often pauses to consider her surroundings and the stone fencerow. Realizing that the fence was most likely built by her ancestors, she wonders at their lives and the parallels with her own—lives of kin who had bones “broke and mended wrong, so they limped through life on the bad-mend bones for year upon year until falling dead” (28). Ree then notes that her father could be anywhere; he has an unpredictable nature that once led him to drive thirty miles to show off a recent gunshot wound to his friends, with complete disregard to the wound itself. Ree recalls that Jessup had once left for three years with idealistic plans to work on a Louisiana oil rig and become wealthy. However, he only made it to Texas, where he boxed with Mexicans, earning little money. In keeping with Jessup’s mercurial nature, Ree recalls that he had once had a girlfriend named April in Arkansas—a relationship that Ree believes caused her mother’s mind to “break loose and scatter” (30). Although Ree does not know if Jessup has been with April in the last two years, his long-distance affair reminds Ree that her father, by nature, often wandered far from home.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
Woodrell continues to develop Ree’s role as a caretaker for her family. She devotes herself to her mentally and emotionally withdrawn mother. She has also become the primary maternal figure for her two younger siblings. Throughout the novel Ree’s ambition to educate her brothers also becomes clear. She teaches them how to survive and sustain themselves in a variety of conditions, but she also teaches them how to care for her mother. In doing so, Ree attempts to prepare them for her eventual absence.
The reader is also introduced to Uncle Teardrop in these chapters. Teardrop ultimately becomes one of the more complex characters in the novel, although Woodrell first introduces him through Ree’s perspective as an intimidating man with little interest in kinship or its attendant responsibilities. As such, he is initially a rather one-dimensional character. Ree compares Teardrop to a snake throughout the novel, “fanged and coiled” (24), and she often waits for him to strike. However, Teardrop begins to impart wisdom to Ree regarding the relationships between the different Dolly clans. These relationships, and the concept of being a “foreigner” even to members of your own family, structure Dolly alliances and communications. Although Ree does not initially realize it, Teardrop begins to serve as a mentor to Ree.
Woodrell also begins to articulate the Dolly’s elemental connection to nature and the Ozark environment in Chapter 6. As Ree looks at the stone fencerow, contemplating the parallels between her life and those of her ancestors, it seems as if the Dolly clan has fused with the valley. The Dolly presence is lasting, if weathered. Moreover, this scene further develops Ree’s fatalistic view on Dolly life in the valleys. She sees generations of Dollys as merely a perpetuation of pain—of broken bones mended poorly—without hope of remedy. Her perspective corresponds with her memory of her father, another Dolly intimate with violence. Her memories of Jessup’s ill-fated career as a boxer and his flippant delight at being shot in the chest, suggest that the Dolly family is not only used to pain, but lives by it.
