Love Medicine | Techniques/Literary Precedents
As linked short stories that compose a novel, Love Medicine is filled with gaps or holes in action that a narrator ordinarily summarizes. James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) experimented with unsummarized gaps in scene, time, and place in his novel, and the effect is that readers are forced to find connections that wind up being thematic and emotive between scenes. Erdrich has done much the same thing in Love Medicine. If one imaginatively puts the narrative in order chronologically and organizes action by characters appearing in more than...
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