Tracks by Louise Erdrich

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 clear between the traditionalist Nanpush and the assimilated Pauline, setting up the main tension and conflict in the story, which centers on Fleur. 2: Look up trickster figure "Nanabozo" or "Nanabush" or Nanapush in Ojibwa mythology.

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 and encourages the relationship between Fleur Pillager and Eli Kapshaw, which Pauline wishes to destroy.

3: What is power? Relate it to the characters in the book (1 page). Power is difficult to define precisely in Tracks, since it seems to be a force of nature that is present everywhere. Nanapush describes this strange, magical power when he mentions that the corrupt Indian agent was found in the woods one day "eating roots and gambling with ghosts," and that other men associated with the timber company were known to have simply disappeared without a trace (Erdrich 9).

Fleur Pillager has some kind of mystical or supernatural power that is hard to define, and perhaps she does not even control it, but its effects are real enough. Although she is not a narrator in the novel and her life is described by Nanapush and Pauline, they are clearly aware that she is not at all like ordinary people.

According to Pauline, when she was young she almost drowned twice, and when two men rescued her, one disappeared and the other "got himself run over by his own surveyor's cart" (Erdrich 10). After incidents like these, other people avoided her because they thought that the waterman monster Misshepeshu "wanted her for himself" (Erdrich 10). When the three men in Argus rape her after she beats them in a poker.