The Half-Skinned Steer

by

Annie Proulx

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Memory and the Past Theme Analysis

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Proulx’s story is told largely via flashback, as Mero recalls various childhood memories during his drive home to attend his brother Rollo’s funeral. This suggests that Mero is a character more emotionally focused on the past than on the present. As Mero continues to fixate on people and places from long ago, however, his memories prove unreliable, and he ultimately places himself in dangerous situations that result in his probable death. In Proulx’s story, history perilously overshadows the present: emotional memories become more important than current circumstances, illustrating the danger of living in one’s past.

On his drive homeward, Mero reminisces about his family’s dynamics, fixating on his judgments of his relatives. Mero relies on his past opinions to shape his perspective, as he has no other source of insight into his relatives’ personalities. For example, Mero discusses how, in his childhood, his father got a job as a mailman, leading him to resent the old man for this “defection” from ranching. Mero recalls how his father “looked guilty” as he delivered mail, and also remembers his father’s constant drinking. Mero never saw past these paternal failures, and flippantly claims his old man “must be dead fifty years or more,” indicating that he does not know when his father died. Mero’s past opinion of his father pre-empted any reconnection; he was satisfied with his initial opinion, and never attempted to amend it.

Mero also reminisces about the interactions between his father, his father’s girlfriend, and Rollo. At the time, although she was his father’s girlfriend, she “played” the entire family “like a deck of cards.” Mero’s memory highlights how she “charged” the men with an “intensity of purpose,” and provided a source of tension. Despite the fact that these interactions happened decades ago, Mero still relies on these memories to understand his family’s emotional dynamic. Mero then claims he never came to visit because he did not want to see his family “bankrupt and ruined.” Mero is assured of his family’s misfortune, even though he never came back to see it himself; he blindly trusts his former judgment of his family’s situation, and his pride denies people the potential for change or growth.

Mero’s memories often help him justify and compartmentalize his life decisions. As he explains how his past has led him to his current circumstances, however, he begins to disregard the dangers of the present. In one scene, Mero recalls a past motivation for his departure from the ranch: after viewing the complicated dynamics between his father, brother, and his father’s girlfriend, he realized his life was not likely to change. Mero recalls watching his brother covet his old man’s girlfriendwhom Mero himself described with sexual language, comparing her to a robust horseand chooses to leave, as he wants to find his own “territory.” Immediately after recalling this memory, Mero is pulled over by a cop who asks him “where he was going.” Mero admits that he momentarily forgot “what he was doing there.” Mero, lost in memories that are foundational to his past, briefly cannot remember why he is returning home.

As Mero gets closer to the ranch, his long-term memories overtake his short-term memory. Despite being able to recall the intricacies of his family’s relationships, Mero forgets which ramp to use on the highway, and tries to use a hotel sign as a landmark but ends up on the “wrong side” of the interstate. When he finds the correct entrance ramp, he drives recklessly, which triggers a multicar pile-up. Mero remembers the past with clarity, but his memories distract him, and he becomes a more absent-minded and thoughtless driver in the present. This again underscores the peril of living in the past.

Mero’s reliance on memory continues to lead him into danger; eventually, despite his belief that he knows the ranch, his misjudgment results in his probable death. As Mero nears home, he realizes he does not “recognize” the “turnoff to the ranch,” despite his claims that he can visualize it in his mind. He turns into what he believes is the right entrance, but as the road gets “rougher” and he realizes that he is wrong. Despite Mero’s ability to recall his youth with precise detail, he relies too heavily on inaccurate memories and gets lost. Mero’s car then gets stuck in the snow, and he wonders if he can wait out the storm and head to his neighbor’s house in the morning for help. He then remembers his neighbor is long dead, another clear slippage in his memory. Mero finally admits that the “map of the ranch in his memory” is “obliterated,” and acknowledges that he was over-reliant on his memories of home, which are clearly outdated.

Mero gets out of the car to try and extricate the stuck tire. When he grabs the “car door handle” to get back inside, however, he realizes that he forgot “the keys in the ignition.” He smashes a rock through the window to retrieve them, and then sees the “passenger door” was unlocked the whole time. This indicates that his decision-making abilities are clearly addled. The car’s engine dies, and Mero realizes that he is fatally trapped in the storm. His situation is a direct consequence of his failing recall; his overconfidence in his memories, which were dangerously inaccurate, lead him into mortal danger.

In Proulx’s story, Mero reminisces about childhood, revealing that his past impressions have remained untested in his old age. Mero’s fixation with his memories prevents him from moving on: he continues to get lost in his past to the point that he loses contact with his current circumstances. Proulx’s story thus illustrates how living in the past is a hindrance to one’s present: when one is consumed by their memories, they become increasingly disengaged from their actual, ongoing existence.

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Memory and the Past Quotes in The Half-Skinned Steer

Below you will find the important quotes in The Half-Skinned Steer related to the theme of Memory and the Past.
The Half-Skinned Steer Quotes

They called it a ranch and it had been, but one day the old man said it was impossible to run cows in such tough country where they fell off cliffs, disappeared into sinkholes … where hay couldn’t grow but leafy spurge and Canada thistle throve … The old man wangled a job delivering mail, but looked guilty fumbling bills into his neighbors’ mailboxes.

Mero and Rollo saw the mail route as a defection from the work of the ranch, work that fell on them.

Related Characters: Mero Corn, Rollo Corn, Mero’s Father/Old Man
Related Symbols: The Ranch
Page Number: 21
Explanation and Analysis:

The old man’s hair was falling out, Mero was twenty-three and Rollo twenty and she played them all like a deck of cards. If you admired horses you’d go for her with her arched neck and horsy buttocks, so high and haunchy you’d want to clap her on the rear. The wind bellowed around the house, driving crystals of snow through the cracks of the warped log door and all of them in the kitchen seemed charged with some intensity of purpose.

Related Characters: Mero Corn, Rollo Corn, Mero’s Father/Old Man, The Girlfriend
Related Symbols: Horses
Page Number: 24
Explanation and Analysis:

Mero had thrashed all that ancient night, dreamed of horse breeding or hoarse breathing, whether the act of sex or bloody, cut-throat gasps he didn’t know. The next morning he woke up drenched in stinking sweat, looked at the ceiling and said aloud, it could go on like this for some time. He meant cows and weather as much as anything, and what might be his chances two or three states over in any direction. In Woolfoot, riding the Exercycle, he thought the truth was somewhat different: he’d wanted a woman of his own without scrounging the old man’s leftovers.

Related Characters: Mero Corn
Related Symbols: The Ranch, Horses
Page Number: 25
Explanation and Analysis:

I’ll tell you, on Tin Head’s ranch things went wrong. Chickens changed color overnight, calves was born with three legs, his kids was piebald and his wife always crying for blue dishes. Tin Head never finished nothing he started, quit halfway through a job every time … He was a mess with the galvy plate eating at his brain and his ranch and his family was a mess. But … they had to eat, didn’t they, just like anybody else?

Related Characters: The Girlfriend (speaker), Mero Corn, Tin Head
Page Number: 26–27
Explanation and Analysis:

He missed the westbound ramp and got into torn-up muddy streets, swung right and right again, using the motel’s SLEEP sign as a landmark, but he was on the wrong side of the interstate and the sign belonged to a different motel … Halfway around the hoop he spied the interstate entrance ramp, veered for it, collided with a panel truck … was rammed from behind by a stretch limo, the limo in its turn rear-ended by a yawning hydroblast operator in a company pickup … His first thought was to blame Iowa and those who lived in it.

Related Characters: Mero Corn
Page Number: 28–29
Explanation and Analysis:

Yet everything was as it had been, the shape of the road achingly familiar, sentinel rocks looming as they had in his youth. There was an eerie dream quality in seeing the deserted Farrier place leaning east as it had leaned sixty years ago, the Banner ranch gate, where the companionable tracks he had been following turned off, the gate ghostly in the snow but still flying its wrought iron flag, unmarked by the injuries of weather, and the taut five-strand fences and dim shifting forms of cattle.

Related Characters: Mero Corn
Related Symbols: The Ranch
Page Number: 34
Explanation and Analysis:

Now he remembered that the main entrance gate was on a side road that branched off well before the Banner place … the map of the ranch in his memory was not as bright now, but scuffed and obliterated as though trodden. The remembered gates collapsed, fences wavered, while the badland features swelled into massive prominence. The cliffs bulged into the sky, lions snarled, the river corkscrewed through a stone hole at a tremendous rate and boulders cascaded from the heights. Beyond the barbwire something moved.

Related Characters: Mero Corn
Related Symbols: The Ranch
Page Number: 38
Explanation and Analysis: