Set on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in north-central Montana during the late 1960s, Winter in the Blood follows a nameless Blackfeet and Gros Ventre (A'aninin) man's episodic journey to piece together his fragmented identity.
[6] After getting into a bar fight with a white man, the narrator comes home drunk to discover that his girlfriend, Agnes, has disappeared with his electric razor and gun.
The narrator travels to Malta, Montana, to track her down, where he meets a white nameless "Airplane Man" from New York heading out West.
[1] The narrator says, "I felt no hatred, no love, no guilt, no conscience, nothing but a distance that had grown through the years"[2] and proceeds to exist in an inebriated state throughout most of the novel, constantly reliving old memories.
Allen states that the narrator is so "out of touch with himself that his long past relationships with his dead brother and father have more meaning for him than any of his contemporary ones, and he is adrift in a life that lacks shape, goal, understanding, or significance.
[11] Kathleen M. Sands describes the narrator as someone who is "ineffective in relationships with people and at odds with his environment, not because he is deliberately rebellious, or even immaturely selfish, but because he has lost the story of who he is, where he has come from.
"[12] Allen observes that the nameless narrator carries physical injuries and emotional trauma engendered by the death of his brother and father.
[13] Louis Owens writes that, "without an identity, the narrator is frozen in time, caught up in a wintry dormancy as he moves tentatively and tortuously toward a glimmer of self-knowledge.
Owens states that, "following the momentary response to life, the narrator begins to recount the events leading to his brother's death" and relives memories of his deceased father, First Raise.
[14] The novel continues a pattern of having traumatic triggers engender moments of reflective recovery with the "wild-eyed cow," Agnes, Marlene, Malvina, and Bird all contribute to the narrator's repeated regressions and violent outbursts.
"[14] His final moment of recovery, as represented in his conversation with Yellow Calf, is precipitated by memories of previous confrontations and re-livings of past events.
Louise Erdrich's introduction to Winter in the Blood called the novel a "work of slim majesty, lean, rich, funny, and grim" [2] and a "quiet American masterwork.
[17] In 2003, retired University of Montana literature professor William "Bill" Bevis described the book as an "unflinching look at life on a Montana reservation," [18] written so brilliantly "in [terms of] technique that it really took Native American writing to a new level" [18] with "poetic and the [that] images were so exact...a great combination of poetic technique and hard realism.