Sign Up Now
Get instant access to over 1 million+ study documents
OR
Already registered? click here to login
By creating your account, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and student honor code.
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 earth could hold" (Erdrich 1). He tells his granddaughter how he rescued her mother Fleur Pillager from a cabin where all her other family members had died and cured her of the disease. In Chapter 2, the story is taken up by Pauline, who reports that she always wanted to assimilate to white culture and moved to the town of Argus before the epidemic. Her father warned her that "you'll fade out there….You won't be an Indian once you return," to which Pauline replies "then maybe I won't come back" (Erdrich 14). She believes that her life should be better than that on the reservation, which she believes offers only poverty, disease and starvation. From the start, Erdrich makes the distinction...
How does Nanapush resemble this character and how not?
Nanpbozho was a great and powerful god who taught human beings how to use fire, make arrows and hatchets, build canoes and gave the Chippewas "all their rights and the mysteries of their religion" (Gonsior 26). Nanapush cannot claim to have the powers and knowledge of this deity, but he does have knowledge of the past and future, a trickster-god's sense of humor, and like the god is also reputed to be a good lover who "satisfied three wives" (Erdrich 41). When his father named him after the god, he said that "the first Nanapush stile fire. You will steal hearts" (Erdrich 33). Nanapush is an also healer of minds and bodies like the God of Humanity and Medicine, and even saved his own life by talking so much that "death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on" (Erdrich 46). He is also a romantic and matchmaker…
WORKS CITED
Erdrich, Louise. Tracks. NY: Henry Holt, 1988.
Gonsior, Jeanette. "Exploring Native American Culture through Conflicting Cultural Views: 'Magical Realism' in Louise Erdrich's Tracks." GRIN Verlag, 2009.
West, Rinda. Out of the Shadow: Ecopsychology, Story, and Encounters with the Land. University of Virginia Press, 2007.
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
narrators in Tracks shows that there is no unified Indian experience. Indian wise men like Nanapush can love their tribes and Indian identities give spiritual significance to their hardship and endure much and learn much from whatever life offers them. Other Indians, like Pauline, are torn asunder by the low value placed on Indian culture by Americans and feel jealous even of their own people, like Fleur, whom Nanapush
Native American History In the Twentieth Century focuses on the famous novel written by Erdrich Louise called Tracks. This paper focuses on the theme of the novels and links them to the following novels namely, Talking Back to Civilization by Frederick Hoxie, Boarding School Seasons by Brenda Child and Major Problems in American Indian History by Hurtado and Iverson. This paper also highlights the problems, which the Native Indians
Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian McCarthy, a Pulitzer Prize winner (for his novel The Road) and highly respected novelist, is said to have gone into a lot of research on the history of the Southwest prior to writing Blood Meridian. And so, while this is fiction, the novel has a basis for its plot. Indeed the Mexican-American War (during which the U.S. annexed Texas) and the concept of Manifest Destiny are definite
Love Med Love and Loss in Love Medicine The sad narrative of life on an Indian Reservation is one that cannot be told within the scope of a single generation. Instead, it must relayed across multiple interconnected generations persisting within a beleaguered collective culture. In many ways, this is the only way to gain a nuanced understanding of the way tribal life now persists, splintered by the invasion of the European lifestyle
Elizabeth Bishop's, "Filling Station" Elizabeth Bishops poem "Filling Station" is about the poet's ability to see something magnificent in the most ordinary of things. It is through the observation of a dirty filling station that Bishop is able to see an example of love. Bishop is known by her skill of employing imagery with attention to detail. (Lauter 2294) In "Filling Station,"she successfully transforms a greasy filling station into a