Most sixteen-year-olds in the twenty-first century worry about passing high school classes, going out with friends, or competing in extracurricular activities. Ree Dolly, the protagonist of Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone, provides a stark contrast through the lens of the oldest child in an impoverished family. With her mother “lost to the present” (Woodrell 6) and her father “anywhere with anybody” (Woodrell 30), Dolly must assume the role of caretaker for her two younger siblings. Her eagerness to “be old enough to join the army” (Woodrell 26) indicates her exhaustion with life in the Ozarks, where “two hundred Dollys, plus Lockrums, Boshells, Tankerslys, and Langas . . . unleashed hell on enemies” (Woodrell 8). Dolly’s dreams of escaping the Ozarks do not change throughout the novel, but the plan to achieve these dreams changes as she accepts that must raise her brothers so that they “would not be . . . dulled to life, empty of kindness, boiling with mean” (Woodrell 8). The best way she can escape the Ozarks is by helping her brothers, the people she cares about most, become better people.
This decision is consistently foreshadowed through Dolly’s journey to find her father. Between traveling across the Ozarks to interrogate her relatives, she teaches her brothers skills necessary to survive, such as how to “aim good” (Woodrell 79) with a gun and “yank out them guts” (Woodrell 106) from a squirrel to prepare it for a meal. These instances demonstrate the role that Dolly has increasingly assumed. She interacts with the boys as a sister, but she cares for them like a parent. Furthermore, while Dolly had “three kinds of footprints stomped on her legs” (Woodrell 145) she spent her time “in her head . . . furnishing a cave” (Woodrell 146) where she could care for her mother and brothers if they lost their house. This situation exemplifies how she places her brothers’ needs before her own. Because of the role she is forced to assume due to her physically and mentally absent parents, Dolly realizes that she alone can provide her brothers with the love and nurturing they all need to truly escape the Ozarks.
