Sunrise

Obreht interjects Coll’s storyline into the main narrative, establishing it as an interlude that can provide contrast to the novel’s first two protagonists. What sets Coll apart from Nina and Vargas is the tension surrounding his sense of masculinity: He wants to express himself in this environment by injecting the fun of theatricality into the harshness that surrounds him, but this ends up clashing with the harsh self that other men and women expect him to be. These selves culminate in Coll’s private recollection of grabbing a wolf’s severed paw “like a microphone” (175) to join a karaoke performance, a moment that successfully merges these two visions of himself but later becomes the source of immense guilt and the fear of his impending death. Publicly, Coll curates an intellectual persona as the head of the historical society, a self-aware “theater kid” (174) who directs community plays. However, when confronted by Bob Fournier’s aggressive, hyper-masculine taunts, this identity proves fragile. To avoid being shamed as an outsider, Coll overcorrects, fully committing to the macabre spectacle that Fournier enacts. His performance is an act of desperate social survival, an attempt to prove he belongs among the very men he otherwise disdains. The moment Fournier presents him with the paw as if it were a “ceremonial rod” (176) is a symbolic initiation into a toxic code of conduct he cannot uphold. His subsequent violent vomiting and furtive disposal of the paw underscore his deep shame and self-disgust. Coll’s internal conflict is rooted in his fear of being perceived as weak or different in a community that values a specific brand of rugged, anti-intellectual manhood. His failure to stand with the bartender, AJ, and his capitulation to Fournier represent a moral collapse driven by this deep-seated insecurity, a private shame that haunts his public actions throughout the chapter.

The introduction of the 1936 audio recording of Frederick Kipley directly confronts The Mythologization of the American West, challenging the very historical narrative Coll has built his identity around. The tape is a disruptive artifact that destabilizes the simplified, heroic legend of Anton Vargas. Where Coll’s reenactment relies on a sanitized, community-approved script, Kipley’s candid interview offers a more complex and humanizing portrait. He describes Vargas as a man who “couldn’t ride for shit” (195) and who consciously crafted a gallant persona. Furthermore, Kipley’s account grounds the story in verifiable historical injustice, explaining that Preacher’s radicalism was a direct response to the US government’s brutal treatment of the Northern Cheyenne. This detail replaces the abstract good-versus-evil conflict of popular lore with a specific, politically charged reality. The chapter’s structure, which juxtaposes Coll’s desperate efforts to conceal his own shameful actions with the revelations on the tape, suggests a parallel between personal and historical revisionism. Louise’s recording becomes a force of unwelcome truth, threatening the controlled, celebratory version of the past that Coll has so carefully curated for his community and for himself.

Sickness and contagion link Coll’s moral failings to physical decay. The narrative begins with Coll’s nausea after the bar incident, then escalates with news of Bob Fournier’s mysterious, fatal illness, which the sheriff investigates as a “health angle” (176) related to the wolf carcass. This physical sickness acts as a metaphor for a moral or psychological malady. Coll is suffering from the rot of his lie, the toxicity of performative masculinity, and the contagion of a violent history that infects the present. The horror becomes terrifyingly literal for Coll as he develops a fever and a crushing headache, fearing he has contracted the same fatal disease. His disturbing dream of a gaunt Fournier visiting him in the kitchen gives form to this fear, suggesting an affliction that is as much psychological as it is pathological. The contagion spreads from the desecrated animal to the man who killed it, and now threatens the man who participated in the desecration, collapsing the distinction between physical illness and spiritual corruption.

The dismembered wolf carcass and its aftermath serve as a grisly emblem for the theme of Nature’s Indifference to Human Ego. Fournier’s cruel acts towards the wolf carcass are a display of dominance, a crude attempt to assert his power over the natural world. However, nature swiftly undermines this performance of conquest. The wolf, even in death, becomes a vector for disease, transforming Fournier’s trophy into the agent of his demise. Fournier’s death and Coll’s ensuing fever demonstrate that human dramas of power and identity are ultimately insignificant when confronted by the impartial and often lethal forces of the natural world.

Coll’s climactic argument with Louise at Sunrise exposes his role as a protective, and ultimately unreliable, gatekeeper of local myth. When Louise presents the Kipley recording, Coll reacts with personal fury. He dismisses the tape as unverifiable and angrily defends the established legend, insisting, “Anton Vargas, he’s our guy” (213). His possessive language reveals that his historical work is deeply intertwined with his own sense of belonging and identity. For Coll, the reenactment is less a historical project than a communal ritual that reinforces a specific, comforting fiction. His accusation that Louise does not “understand it or care about it” (213) is a projection of his own fear that an outside perspective will dismantle the carefully constructed world he oversees. His final, desperate outburst reveals the core of his anxiety: The official story, like a photograph, is a selective and flattened representation that can never capture the full, complex reality of the past, a truth he is unwilling to confront.