Tracks by Louise Erdrich Term Paper

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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.

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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….....

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