"He wasn't satisfied," I said.
"He accomplished any number of things."
"But none of them satisfied him."
Theresa whirled around, her eyes large and dark with outrage. "And why not?"
"He wasn't happy..."
The narrator and his mother are talking about his father and about what sort of a man he was. From their conversation it is concluded that he was a good man who loved his family very much, who tried to take care of them to the best of his abilities, but he was also a wanderer who liked alcohol and making the white men laugh at the bar. His father and brother are two people the narrator had emotions for and both of them are gone. Now, that he is a man himself, the narrator has the understanding for his father more than ever; maybe because he realizes the similarity he has with him which is the lack of happiness, emotion and satisfaction. His father, just like the narrator, wanted to lose himself and he was able to do that by drinking, which brought him to his end.
"But the distance I felt came not from country or people; it came from within me. I was as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon."
The narrator explains the reason he has the feeling of emotional alienation from others-from his mother, grandmother, wife... It is because he is alienated from himself, he is distant from himself, and he is lost. Later we discover that the main reason for this distance is the guilt he feels for the death of his brother.
"What use," I whispered, cried for no one in the world to hear, not even Bird, for no one but my soul, as though the words would rid it of the final burden of guilt, and I found myself a child again, the years shed as a snake sheds its skin, and I was standing over the awkward tangle of clothes and limbs."
Trying to save the cow from the mud makes the narrator finally face the past. It makes him remember the night his brother died and the hopelessness he felt as a child. From this we get to see that his soul is haunted with the guilt, from that dreadful moment and on, he was lost, he was no longer himself and at this crucial moment towards the end of the novel he finally faces that what troubled him for so long.
