Polyphonic Writing Of Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine And The Plague Of Doves

In Love Medicine and The Plague of Doves,Native American literary mogul Louise Erdrich composes epics of the authentic lives of the Native Indians by employing the polyphonic narrative technique.Unlike the traditional monologic narrative,Erdrich enables multiple narrators with independent voices to take turns to tell their distinctive and interrelated stories,which coincides with Mikhail Bakhtin's polyphonic novel theory.This thesis attempts to analyze the polyphony in Love Medicine and The Plague of Doves from three aspects: heteroglossia,dialogism and unfinalizability.Primarily,Erdrich's multiple perspective narrative accords with Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia in the polyphonic novel.The land loss,the religious conversion,and the seeking for self-identity are the various themes sung by different narrators who hold multiple subjective judgments.Their voices are like separate and independent melodies winding each other,composing the ensemble of the diverse lives of the Native Indians.In addition,Erdrich makes dialogues penetrate everywhere within her two works.She combines the great dialogue embodied in the counterpoint of the overall structure and characters' relationships with the microdialogue manifested in the double-voiced dialogue and the monologue,which represents the dialogism in the polyphonic novel.Notably,Erdrich's exquisite juxtaposition of the great dialogue and the microdialogue are like playing a symphony that comprises two dialogicmovements.Furthermore,the unfinalizability is also to be examined in the two novels.Through presenting the indeterminacy of the life prospects of the characters and that of their cultural choices,Erdrich composes an unfinished polyphonic rhyme.In a sense,the artistic charm of Erdrich's Love Medicine and The Plague of Doves lies in the heteroglossia,dialogism,and unfinalizability of polyphony,which is precisely in accordance with the pluralistic,ambiguous and vague state of the current world we humans have experienced.Through an in-depth interpretation of the two polyphonic works,this thesis shows Erdrich's humanistic concern and deep sympathy for the Native Indians' living state under the white's colonial rule.Meanwhile,Erdrich also expresses her efforts to call for an equal distribution of discourse power and the dialogic relationships between multiple cultures.