Louise Erdrich's The Round House

Native American reservations are a whole other world within the boundary lines of America; not many people are aware of the differences between the laws in state lines and the laws in reservation lines. Reservations for the most part, govern themselves like a state governs itself under the federal government. Additionally, not many people are aware of the injustices that Native Americans suffer every day due to these variations. In Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, injustices for crimes committed on reservations, specifically rape, is a prominent theme seen throughout the novel. Applying Dasenbrock’s concept of intelligibility to the novel, readers obtain a more meaningful understanding of what justice means on a native American reservation. Dasenbrock’s concept of intelligibility is that if a writer does or doesn’t provide additional information to a reader about the subject of the text, is the text more or less meaningful? Although Erdrich does not specifically take the time to explain to readers the process by which crimes on the reservation are tried, readers are capable of grasping the full meaning at hand. The meaning and effects of justice on reservations is conveyed through the first person perspective of the narrator. …show more content…
The novel is told in first person perspective, narrated by a man name Joe Coutts who is reiterating his summer of 1988. During that summer, his mother Geraldine is raped and her perpetrator is a non-Indian. Because of many conflicting justice laws on the reservation, justice is not served the way it would be anywhere else in America. The narration of the story contributes to the meaningfulness of the subject at hand: rape on native American reservations. There are many instances in the novel where the narrator expresses the difficulty in getting justice for the crimes committed against