The Narrative Turn in Recent Minority Fiction

Abstract

lives of her people into one seamless text. Part of the pleasure of reading Love Medicine (1984), her first published novel, is slowly piecing together how its many characters are related. The Beet Queen (1986) focuses on fewer people, but the theme of connections emerges even more insistently in the imagery that organizes the text. The figure of the web shows up repeatedly, in the web of thick dead vines that holds one character as in a hammock (154); in the silky nest a spider weaves in a baby's hair, a complicated house, too beautiful to destroy (176); in the red maze a woman has knitted into a sweater, a tangle of pathways without an exit (277); and in the thread of flight, a thread that links three generations of people who have hardly known one another (335). Consequently, when Nanapush talks about the mysterious patterns that stories reveal, we are prepared to understand: There is a story to it the way there is a story to all, never visible while it is happening. Only after, when an old man sits dreaming and talking in his chair, the design springs clear (Tracks 34). The theme of storytelling in Erdrich's fiction prompts us to think about narrative not only among minority writers, but