There are few laughs in Winter in the Blood … even though the narrator shares characteristics of a trickster, joker, and fool…. [The] narrator is a mediator and thus an ambiguous and equivocal character. The polar terms he attempts to mediate or reconcile are the fundamental ones of life and death, past and present, winter and summer, Indian and white cultures, the nature of men and women, sex and love, self and others. But unlike the tricksters of his Indian heritage, Welch's narrator is human and so must pay the psychological and spiritual price for existing between extremes, unreconciled to either of them…. [He] is his own man discontent with his present, haunted by his past …, and uncertain of his future. His isolation is all the more bitter as we realize how important a sense of belonging and a spirit of community were for tribal Indians. The comic spirit...