'Cowboys and Indians': analyse af novelle

The short story is about the narrator and her cousin David. It takes place in South America, where their grandmother who has just passed away lived. The narrator has just arrived back at her grandmother’s house after the funeral and the house is full of guests. She needs to get out, so she calls her cousin David. He arrives on his bike and they decide to go to a bar, to get some Margaritas. When they leave the bar, they want to see the sunset up on the bluffs. They lay there for a while. They talk about their grandmother and their grandfather who has passed away twelve years ago. On the way home they stop to get something to eat. They meet two Indian women and one of them claims that they have brought evil spirits with them. This seems to get David uncomfortable, which the narrator doesn’t understand. When they arrive at their grandmother’s house, they say goodbye and David takes off.

The narrator can be described in two ways. When she’s with David she’s relaxed and she forgets about all bad things. Usually people see her as this smart, polite, good girl who can do nothing wrong. She’s no rebel at all, but things seem to change a little when she’s with David. She feels like going to bars and she doesn’t care if David rides too fast on his bike or smokes marihuana. She seems more alive, as if she has more personality and it’s easier to get an impression of who she is as a person, despite from when she’s not with David. She has always been a little different from the other grandchildren of the family, which is also the reason why her grandfather despised her. When we see her at her grandmother’s house she’s quieter and it seems like she’s holding back a little to fit in. She has this ability to switch between two different personalities, which we see in the following quotation: “Why is it that I can do this, switch gears, when David cannot? I will recount memories of my grandmother to drunken mourners, throw out paper plates, make polite conversation, and clean coffee cops while David rides through the desert with devil spirits at his boot heels”.