Going through confusion in Erdrich’s Love Medicine

Plan

Introduction

I) Blurriness and lack of order as a way of creating powerful characters.

a) Multiplicity of narrative voices: the novel’s strength in character’s construction. b) External objects, a way of knowing about the individuality of each character.

II) The meanings of the novel: a reader ‘s construct

a) Subjectivity and multiplicity of points of views b) Repetitions c) Blanks , indeterminacy as part of construction of meaning

Conclusion

Louise Erdrich is one of the most prolific and challenging contemporary Native American writer. American and German through her father and French and Ojibwa through her mother, her fictions reflect aspects of her mixed heritage. She is the author of a number of award-winning novels, including The Beet Queen, Tracks, and The Bingo Palace. She also has written two collections of poetry entitled Jacklight and Baptism of Desire as well as books for children and short stories. Her first novel Love Medicine, first published, 1983 introduces several generations in the interrelated families living in and around a fictional reservation of North Dakota. Spanning fifty years, from 1934 through 1984, the novel is told through the voices of different characters, mostly Chippewa men and women who struggle to gain some control over their lives. Confusion prevails throughout the novel. Indeed, when first reading Love Medicine the reader faces a certain lack of unity for there is neither one main character nor one unique narrator. The reader is also confronted to a complicated plot that involves more than 17 characters from five distinct families (the Lazarres, the Morriseys, the Kashpaws, the Lamartines and the Nanapushes) and 14 different stories that are not always narrated in chronological order. The aim of this exposé will be to show how this chaos and apparent lack of