Love Medicine By Louise Erdrich: A Literary Analysis

The most common desire amongst human beings is to belong, and when a person works hard to change a dream, it is often with the underlying goal to get to a place in their life where they truly feel they have made a home. This longing is only more intense among people who have lost their home, or have it taken away from them. A prime example of this is the Native American people whose land was sacrificed by the people who invaded it, an experience that many colonized people are familiar with this feeling of unhomeliness. For this reason, the theme of unholiness is reflected in the writings of the uprooted people, and modern pieces of Native American literature are certainly no exception. Louise Erdrich creates a rich and complex world throughout …show more content…
In the first chapter the narrator Alberta describes a family reunion after the death of her aunt, and in this family reunion the character of King Kashpaw is dramatically introduced (Love Medicine 17). After an evening of being outspoken and over drinking, King ends up attacking his wife in the kitchen, and action which she responds to by telling him, “‘It’s them. You always get so crazy when you’re home.’” (Erdrich, Love Medicine 42) However, later in the novel, King is depicted at his own place in the city, and he seems to be equally prone to anger and the need to establish himself as a man (Erdrich, Love Medicine 311). It could potentially be a result of his connection to his Native American family contrasting with his life married to a white woman in the city, but it is never truly made clear to the reader, what is clear is the feeling of displacement that he feels in the world (Erdrich, Love Medicine 311). This theme of unhomeliness is present not only in smaller, side characters in the novel such as King, but also in the more primary characters such as Nector and Lulu (Erdrich, Love Medicine 130). Nestor falls in love with his wife Marie on the way to propose to his first love Lulu, but he returns to Lulu many years later and embarks on a several year long affair (Erdrich, Love Medicine 130). Despite this, and the fact that Nector ultimately attempts to leave Marie for Lulu, he continued to refer to the life that he made with Marie as his “home”, even if it he doesn’t see it as being the right place for him, and, in a letter to Lulu, he tells her that he is, “all one hundred percent yours.” (Erdrich, Love Medicine 136) This creates a split for the reader, Nector clearly does think that the house he established for his family is his