Tracking and trapping the narrative strategies of Louise Erdrich's 'Love Medicine,' 'The Beet Queen,' and 'Tracks'

Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, and Tracks are stories about communities, about how the individual perceives his/herself in relation both to those in the immediate community and the world. Each novel reaches toward a multi-dimensional understanding of the net of relationships inevitable in communal life and contact between individuals with varying personal perceptions and experience. Dual or multi-perspectival narrative strategies encourage the reader to consolidate many stories and draw connections between diverse and often disparate points of view, as he/she tracks down the story of the absent character and the mark it makes on the other narratives. When read together, these multiple narrators work to contradict, criticize, and cast and re-cast the stories in relation to one another. Tracking through shifting points of view, lies and ambiguities, and stories that appear only superficially linked, the reader becomes more conscious of the importance perspective plays in recognizing the tracks of one story on another. Behind each story is a character's vision which controls narrativity and conveys his/her personal sense of connectedness and separateness to the others. Erdrich uses a narrative strategy of dual or multi-perspectivity to explore how individuals negotiate their own agency and the power of their connections with others. In each novel's structure of independent narrative and narrative dependence, Erdrich reflects the balance individuals need to set between their power to shape and be shaped by other stories and people.