4 ideas
He rebuilds on the same ashen site and lives there alone for decades, half-believing his family might return. Years later a feral 'wolf-girl' with a broken leg appears at his cabin, and he takes her to be his lost daughter.
Early on, Grainier joins a railroad crew trying to throw a Chinese laborer off a bridge; he does not stop it, and the man escapes. Grainier reads his later misfortunes as punishment for that moment.
Grainier neither fully accepts his family's death nor fully believes they survived. He holds the two possibilities at once, and that ambiguity lets him keep living near the loss without being destroyed by it. Mourning here is an unresolved suspension, maintained through small rituals, rather than a sequence of stages that ends in acceptance.
Grainier's anonymous, inarticulate life spans the West from the horse and railroad era to jet planes and television. He builds the infrastructure that transforms the landscape but has no say in the change and little understanding of it. Viewing history through such a life shows modernization as something done by, and to, people who never register as its agents.