In the following excerpt, Schneider examines the unifying role that storytelling plays within Erdrich's novel and between characters in the novel.
Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine has been regarded as simply a collection of short stories, lacking in novelistic unity and overriding structure. Yet despite shifts in narrative style and a virtual cacophony of often individually unreliable narrative voices, Erdrich successfully weds structure and theme, style and content. For the novel is as much about the act of storytelling as it is about the individual narratives and the symbols and interrelationships which weave them together thematically. In Love Medicine, storytelling constitutes both theme and style. Erdrich repeatedly shows how storytelling-characters sharing their troubles or their "stories" with one another-becomes a spiritual act, a means of achieving transformation, transcendence, forgiveness. And in this often comic novel, forgiveness.....
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