| One of the most distinguishing characteristics of the fiction of Louise Erdrich is her building and unraveling of intricate narrative patterns. Especially among the five North Dakota novels---Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, Tracks, The Bingo Palace, and Tales of Burning Love---the dialogue among her various first-person narrators and the primary, organizing narrators of the different novels creates patterns of character and event. Some of the links in these narrative webs are the slightest of hints, inviting readers to take part in the pattern-making. Erdrich leaves gaps in her story patterns, however, withholding information or giving readers conflicting hints. Dates, family relationships, and events vary from novel to novel, creating a pervasive narrative freedom that disrupts her carefully patterned webs.; Although Erdrich's creation and disruption of patterns can be traced in part to her participation in the Western literary tradition, particularly to the influence of modern and postmodern writers, these paradoxical forces in her narrative technique to an even greater extent grow out of the repetition and variation of patterns in an oral storytelling tradition. Traditional oral tales like those of Erdrich's own Ojibwa heritage survive through this interplay between continuance and adaptation. Like these traditional tales, Erdrich's North Dakota saga refuses to end when one novel's storyteller falls silent. And yet, also like this oral tradition, her internovel story does not remain constant, but evolves and changes as it adapts to new narrative situations.; Furthermore, the balance between patterning and freedom in Erdrich's narrative structure not only mirrors the techniques of oral storytelling in general, but also participates in the spirit of the Ojibwa tales' trickster protagonist, Nanabozho, himself a pattern-maker, disrupter, and preeminent survivor. At times, Erdrich's metanarrator---the consciousness linking the multiple narratives of the various novels---plays an overtly trickster role, surprising the reader with unexpected connections and disrupting these patterns with significant gaps and contradictions. This trickster narrator contributes to the story's survival---she liberates it from the death of narrative closure through her weaving of linking patterns and, by altering those patterns, frees it from the prison of monologic truth. |
