"Cowboys" - Susan Steinberg

This is Cathy Lee.

“Cowboys” reads like a personal, intimate recounting of events, rather than a mere first-person narrative. The protagonist slips easily into language that expresses familiarity when she addresses the reader, which she does often, as exemplified in lines such as “I’m telling you this because the story came to me today for no real reason” (p. 26). The protagonist also has the tendency to be distracted easily when recounting events, and often detracts from her current train of thought, or the event that is currently occurring. She slips from subject to subject easily: she jumps from the subject of her father flatlining to her relationship with her and her ex-boyfriend (p. 25), from her father’s vegetative state to the absence of fields in Missouri (p. 25-26), and from the thought of taking her father off the respirator to a slew of musings on sexism, sparked by the doctor’s sigh (p. 27). This underscores how fluid the protagonist’s thought process is. Furthermore, she has a way of simplifying words and making them blunter and franker, without the technical terms others employ to tiptoe around the sensitive subject of euthanasia. She reduces the delicate term “respirator” to “machine” (p. 27), and the euthanizing of her father to “[killing] her father” (p. 23). Coupled with her unorthodox method of storytelling, which reads like a genuine stream of thought, rather than a structured recount of events, this contributes to the emphasis of the intimate feel of the story.