Wersley Hayden's Duties of Sheriff

English 102 W01

Wesley Hayden’s Duties of Sheriff in Larry Watson’s Montana 1948

David Hayden, in Larry Watson’s Montana 1948, demonstrates his father’s role, Wesley, as Mercer County’s sheriff indefinitely and proudly at the beginning of the novel. His son David realizes that the hardship of his father’s childhood injury painstakingly affected the rest of his life. David states why his father wasn’t able to attend the war, “When he was sixteen a horse kicked him, breaking his leg so severely that he walked with a permanent limp, and eventually a cane, his right leg V-ed in, his right knee perpetually pointing to the left” (4). Although it is not specifically mentioned in the novel, this quotation begins to show the immediate hardship Wesley encountered in his adolescence. This unfortunate occurrence made his father mentally stronger, but left him physically weaker for the rest of his life. Mercer County didn’t consist of a substantial population; therefore, one may conclude that being a sheriff in this county wasn’t of greater difficulty. The concept of a small town Sheriff, being able to efficiently and effectively go about his daily doings is presented on the next page, “he arrested the usual weekly drunks, mediated an occasional dispute about fence lines or stray cattle, calmed a few domestic disturbances, and warned the town’s teenagers about getting rowdy in Wood’s Cafe” (5). Dramatic irony is defined as, “The most sophisticated kind of irony. The discrepancy here is between what we as the readers know versus what the characters know. In other words, we know something that one or more characters don’t know” (Turner, Dramatic Irony). The dramatically ironic part of this concept is that Wesley doesn’t know what the future has in store for him; due to the wrongdoings of frank, the protagonist watches his father, face moral conflicts that destroy him, emotionally. Wesley resists doing his job as a sheriff even though “being sheriff of Mercer...