Even after she loses her miracle making ability, Mary is capable of profound insights. "Everything that happened to him in his life," she wonders of her brother, at one point, as she is driving in her car towards the end of the novel. "All the things we said and did. Where did it go?" As she "didn't have an answer," so she "just drove," reflecting "once I had caused a miracle by smashing my face on ice, but now I was an ordinary person. In the few miles we had left I could not help drawing out Celestine's strange ideas in my mind. In my line of work I've seen thousands of brains that belonged to sheep, pork, steers. They were all gray lumps like ours. Where did everything go? What was really inside? The flat fields unfolded, the shallow ditches ran beside the road. I felt the live thoughts hum inside me, and I pictured tiny bees, insects made of blue electricity, in a colony so fragile that it would scatter at the slightest touch. I imagined a blow, like a mallet to the sheep, or a stroke, and I saw the whole swarm vibrating out. Who could stop them? Who could watch them in their hands?" (Erdrich, 1986) Thus, even as a minister of blood and death, Mary is still capable of putting her trade in some philosophical context, a kind of miracle in and of itself, one might add.
Finally, the birth of Wallacette Darlene Adare, known as "Dot' Celestine and Karl's girl, bring together many of the different identities and plots that wind throughout the course of the book's narrative sprawl. She is the child of a half-breed woman and a man of uncertain but white parentage, who is of dubious sexuality. Dot merges in her person the identities of White and Indian, of the different lives of the Adare brother and sister, as Celestine was once Mary's girlhood friend, and also the lives of Karl's town and Mary's country existence and the House of Meats. When the girl Dot finally gains the capability of narrating her own tale she calls her birth the logical outcome of a thread beginning with her grandmother...
Louise Erdrich's poem, "Dear John Wayne," describes assimilation and immigration into a culture defined by racism. Elements of poetry, including diction, image, tone, metaphor, irony, theme, and symbol all play a role in Erdrich's description of culture and racism. Ultimately, "Dear John Wayne" describes white culture's extortion of land and culture from a Native American perspective. The poem begins with a description of group of young Native American men lying on
Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich. Specifically, it will make a claim about the connection between food and conflict in the novel, then support the claim with evidence from the book and personal analysis and interpretation. Food is a very important element in "Love Medicine," and much of the food references in the novel also revolve around conflict, which is a central theme in the novel. Food and conflict often
Tracks by Louise Erdrich It is easy to forget within the pride of patriotism that the United States is a post-colonial culture. Through the devaluation and near extinction of the cultures that once thrived within the confines of what some now consider the greatest country in the world is the story of so many colonized people from all over the world. Though not the only theme within Louise Erdrich's Tracks, the
His mother chose to leave him behind for reasons best known to her and not only that; she also tore him away from two little girls who had been such an important part of his life. This completely changes his personality and when as an adult he loses his wife, he connects his childhood experience to this negative experience and becomes an alcoholic. Thus we can say with some
Tracks Louise Erdich What are the strategies that Erdrich uses to pull the reader quickly into her story? Louise Erdrich pulls the reader into her novel Tracks by using two strong narrators, Nanapush and Pauline Puyat, who are hostile to each other and represent opposed points-of-view, although neither is exactly 100% honest. The story opens during the tuberculosis epidemic of 1912, which "must have cleared all of the Anishinabe (Ojibwa) that the
Ultimately, Karl finds within the society that knows him a willingness to accept him for what he is. It is no longer necessary to hide behind jokes or trickery. He needs not change his sexual identity nor his sense of himself to establish a more mature affiliation with those around him. When reentering the society at Argus, Karl is able to do so still as himself, with a sexual identity
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