“Cowboys” by Susan Steinberg

Hi, this is Lucy Liang

The short story “Cowboys” by Susan Steinberg is told in first person. The first thing that struck me in this story is that there are no quotation marks at all, even though dialogues are used throughout the story. On page 26, “He said, Please”, and on page 27, “The doctor said, A machine is making him breath.” Capitalizing the first letter of a sentence that comes after a comma clearly suggests these are words spoken. This almost gives me a feeling that the story is just the thoughts of the narrator, and that we are watching her trying to sort out her memories. But there are a couple of things that suggest otherwise. The narrator addresses the reader as “you” in several places in the story, like “And I’m telling you this because […]” (26) and “I would not subject you to intentional meaning” (28), as if she is talking directly to the reader. It also seems as if she is constantly explaining herself to the reader. When the narrator told us that the doctor said, “A machine is making him breath”, she explained that he did not use the word “machine” (27), and the same when her mother said she has to “kill” her father (29). She explains herself a lot in a progressive way. In the beginning of the story, the narrator says

I am still able to lie there nights, but I am unable to do much more than that.

Meaning I am still able to lie there nights, but I am unable to stick around in the mornings.

Meaning I am unable to lie there pretending I want what it is I’m supposed to want. (23)

As I read through the story a couple of times, it felt like the narrator gets winded up in her thoughts and her guilt as tells the story, and occasionally jumps out of it and explains a few things to the reader. And as she explains to the reader, she is making sense of it herself as well.