Narrative Point of View in Louise Erdrich's Tracks - MIUSE

PHILOLOGIA 42 (2011) 119-135
1. Introduction
It Comes Up Different Every Time:
Narrative Point of View
in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks
Anthony Piccolo
Although her first novel, Love Medicine (1984), was an immediate popular and
critical success and continues to be her most well-known and best-read work, Louise
Erdrich has since proven herself to be a prolific and important contemporary American
writer with thirteen novels to date plus a range of work in other genres (e.g. poetry,
short fiction, memoir). Her ability to employ a postmodern sensibility while writing
from the perspective of a contemporary Native American woman has attracted
significant critical and scholarly attention.
Born on June 7, 1954 in Minnesota, Erdrich was raised in North Dakota by her
French-Ojibwe mother and German-American father. Her fiction deals primarily,
though not exclusively, with the interrelations among Indians, mixed-bloods, and
whites on and around a North Dakota reservation and in the fictional town of Argus,
North Dakota 1 . Formally, her novels are noted for their experimental aspects: a
complex intertextuality among the novels, a fluid interweaving of past and present in
the telling of her multi-generational family sagas rather than a linear chronology, and
especially her use of multiple points of view (or “polyvocality”) as a narrative
technique. Erdrich‟s narrative approach is often compared with William Faulkner‟s
(cf. As I Lay Dying with its fifty-nine chapters told from the first-person points of view
of fifteen different characters), and with its ten perspectives (six from first-person
points of view), Love Medicine is a prime example of Erdrich‟s use of “polyvocality.”
In Writing Tricksters, Jeanne Rosier Smith refers to Love Medicine as an “almost
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