How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Inman had been given the happy job of escorting a few heifers to graze the last grass of summer in the high balds on Balsam Mountain. He had taken a packhorse loaded with cooking tools, side meat, meal, fishing gear, a shotgun, quilts, and a square of waxed canvas for tent. He expected solitude and self-reliance. But when he got to the bald there was a regular party going on. (1.52)
In the first chapter, we get a story of Inman as a younger man. It's pretty awesome: taking care of cows up on Balsam Mountain, enjoying nature, making friends with a group of Native Americans working nearby, and so on. Would we understand the later Inman as well if we didn't have this moment of his youth to look back on?
Quote #2
From inside the tavern came the sounds of a fiddle being tuned, various plucks and tentative bowings, then a slow and groping attempt at Aura Lee, interrupted every few notes by unplanned squeaks and howls. Nevertheless the beautiful and familiar tune was impervious to poor performance, and Inman thought how painfully young it sounded, as if the pattern of its notes allowed no room to imagine a future clouded and tangled and diminished. (1.60)
Does music have a power to restore innocence? What does the rest of the novel suggest about that idea?
Quote #3
He raised his coffee cup to his lips and found it cold and nearly empty, and he put it down. He stared into it and watched the dark grounds sink in the remaining quarter inch of liquid. The black flecks swirled, found a pattern, and settled. He thought briefly of divination, seeking the future in the arrangement of coffee grounds, tea leaves, hog entrails, shapes of clouds. As if pattern told something worth knowing. (1.61)
Inman seems pretty hopeless here. It sounds as though he's so doubtful of the future after fighting in the war that he doesn't care if he could understand it or not.