SOURCE: Horvath, Brooke K. “Wrapped in a Winter Rug: Richard Brautigan Looks at Common Responses to Death.” Notes on Modern American Literature 8, no. 3 (winter 1984): Item 14.

In the following brief analysis of “Winter Rug,” Horvath discusses the manner in which the characters come to terms with death.

“Winter Rug,” a story included in Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970, reveals in brief compass the preoccupation with death central to Richard Brautigan's fiction.¹ Whereas Brautigan's major imaginative efforts present characters who typically bring radical tactics into play in their efforts to gain psychological control over death (the retreat into fantasy in A Confederate General from Big Sur, death's imaginative revision in Trout Fishing in America, the attempt of the iDEATH inhabitants to live in and with death in In Watermelon Sugar, and the mock-heroic triumph over death achieved in The Abortion), “Winter Rug” examines the paltry efforts of two characters...