73 pages • 2 hours read
Daniel WoodrellWinter's Bone
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 13-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
Ree continues her walk home in the morning. Ice begins to melt in the warmer weather. Ree begins to cry when, crossing a bridge, she realizes that she was staring at the fractured ice of the river below in search of a body.
Chapter 14 Summary
Ree wakes up at home that evening. She throws out the failed “basketti” concoction the boys had tried to make for dinner the night before and begins to cook. Blond Milton arrives and interrupts her preparations with a warning that people are saying Ree is asking too many questions. He brings Ree outsides, throws her to the ground roughly, and tells her to get in his truck. Sonny and Harold follow them outside, and Sonny defends his sister. While Blond Milton expresses pride at his son’s courage, he slaps him across the face as punishment for his foolishness in speaking back to his elder.
After a brief argument, in which Ree tells Blond Milton to fight men, not boys, he places her in the truck and drives her out of town to a house that had burned down. At first, Ree thinks that he’s there to take advantage of her, but he dismisses her worries and draws her attention back to the house: which, he claims, is the last place anyone had seen Jessup. Blond Milton suggests that Jessup’s meth lab had exploded, killing him. Although Blond Milton warns her to stay away from the house due to its residual toxicity, Ree ignores him. As she surveys the destruction, she notes that weeds had grown tall throughout the rubble, suggesting that the house had been destroyed long before Jessup had disappeared and that Blond Milton is lying. Ree initially says nothing to Blond Milton, and on the ride home Blond Milton continues the farce and offers to help the family by taking Sonny into his household. As Ree leaves, she yells back to him that he has insulted her intelligence with his lies and refuses to give Sonny into his care.
Chapter 15 Summary
After leaving Blond Milton, Ree returns to the house and goes to her room to retrieve two guns from her closet. After gathering some bullets, she takes her brothers to the porch to teach them how to shoot. Sonny and Harold collect cans and arrange them for target practice. She shows the shotgun and rifle—heirlooms from Jessup—and they practice until they are low on ammunition. Ree and her brothers are anxious to see a figure approaching the house, but Ree relaxes when she recognizes Gail. Ree strides toward Gail, telling her “I knew you wouldn’t eat shit long” (80-81).
Chapters 13-15 Analysis
In these chapters, the readers are given further insight into Ree’s protective instincts, as well as the complex familial relations that regulate her daily life. In Chapter 13, the disintegrating and fragmenting ice mimics Ree’s internal struggles. On the bridge, she crumbles, much like the warmed fields of snow, when faced with her father’s probable death. As Ree’s search for answers continues, she begins to experience the fragmentation and erosion she witnessed in her mother growing up. In the scene on the bridge, nature poetically mirrors Ree’s internal state.
When Ree returns home, she quickly fortifies herself by resuming her role as caretaker, which demands her resiliency and leadership. She is thrown into turmoil again, however, by the appearance of Blond Milton. Blond Milton serves as largely an antagonistic presence throughout the novel, if only because he typifies the Dolly lifestyle that Ree despises. Blond Milton accepts and revels in the blood-drawn commandments that rule his life, and he often finds himself agitated by Ree’s unwillingness to do the same.
When he visits Ree, he hopes to silence her questioning through lies and manipulation. While his lies insult her intelligence, Ree is enraged by his proposal to take in Sonny, his illegitimate son, because this would destroy her hopes for Sonny’s future. As Ree later comments to Gail, if Blond Milton took Sonny in, he would shape Sonny in his own image.
Ree’s attempt to teach the boys to shoot serves several purposes: to continue the lessons Jessup taught her as she takes on the role of a parent, to prepare the boys for independence, and also to initiate them into the reality of violence that saturates their lives.
