28 pages • 56 minutes read
Louise ErdrichThe Red Convertible
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1974A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Trauma of War
Content Warning: This guide contains references to war-related trauma, suicide, and systemic racism and violence against Indigenous Americans.
Lyman knows almost nothing about what Vietnam was like for Henry. The war happens blurrily, completely off the page, and with unnerving speed. In just over one page, the reader learns that Henry enlisted, became a marine, got deployed to Vietnam in 1970, didn’t write many letters, was captured, and came back home three years later when the war ended. The fast clip of information makes the stark contrast between Henry’s prewar and postwar character all the more chilling. In the span of three pages, the brother who put Susy on his shoulders to twirl and laugh becomes the TV addict who absentmindedly bites through his lip.
Henry’s trauma has ripple effects through the family. Any time he’s not around, he’s what Lyman and his mother talk about. His mother tries to proceed through the lip-biting incident normally, turning off the TV “real quiet” and ushering the boys to dinner (181). This attempt at normalcy is made abnormal by Henry’s trauma, but the characters don’t know what else to do for him. Though the symptoms of PTSD have been recognized since at least World War I, stigma and lack of awareness were still pervasive at the time of the Vietnam War. The US’s legacy of medical abuse against Indigenous Americans and other people of color exacerbates the situation; although Lyman and his mother do vaguely discuss involving “doctors” in Henry’s care, they are understandably reluctant to consult anyone who isn’t Indigenous, and there are no Chippewa doctors on the reservation (another nod to the systemic inequalities facing Indigenous people).
Consequently, the family is left to cope with Henry’s condition on their own. Lyman clearly struggles to understand what is happening to his brother; his summary—“I'll say this: the change was no good” (182)—is so nonspecific that it suggests Lyman can’t even capture his observations in words. However, the descriptions Lyman does offer are telling. Henry alternates between agitation and withdrawal, and his outbursts of anger drive most people away. The imagery that Lyman associates with him suggests that he is already dead or dying: “[W]hen he did [laugh] it was more the sound of a man choking” (182). During the brothers’ excursion to the river, Henry tells Lyman that he “can’t help it [his state]” and that “[i]t’s no use” (187), and he explains that he repaired the car only to hand it over to Henry. Although Henry’s exact intentions in jumping into the river remain ambiguous, it’s clear that he has no hope of recovering from his ordeal.
Coming of Age
Lyman’s actions show a trajectory from innocence and interdependence to experience and independence. Lyman looks up to his older brother, and before Henry leaves for the war, the two are inseparable: “We had always been together before. Henry and Lyman” (185). On the summer road trip, Lyman rarely seems to act on his own. He and Henry buy the car together and make the decision to go to Alaska together. Henry does silly things like playing with Susy, and Lyman reacts. Henry must make his own choices when Lyman’s at war, but those choices seem to mostly be to tread water until he comes back. Notably, Henry (perhaps knowing he could die, if not anticipating the change the war will cause to his character) encourages Lyman to stand on his own two feet before leaving. He gives Lyman the keys to the convertible—a symbol of their bond—and tells him that it now belongs to him. Lyman ignores this and focuses on maintaining the car in “perfect shape” while Henry is away, as though the brothers will simply pick up where they left off when Henry returns.
This is not what happens, but Lyman remains hopeful that he can recover his former relationship with Henry even after seeing how the war changes his brother. The choice to beat up the car is bold for Lyman, but it’s in service of his brother, which tracks with his previous actions. The event is surrounded by several paragraphs of emotional build up and fallout, demonstrating the magnitude of this decision in Lyman’s mind. Before, he reminisces: “I thought back to times we’d sat still for whole afternoons […] He’d always had a joke then, too, and now you couldn’t get him to laugh” (182). In the aftermath, he continues to wallow: “He was better than he had been before, but that’s not still not saying much […] I had been feeling down in the dumps about Henry” (185).
The drive to the Red River initially seems like exactly the childhood throwback Lyman has been hoping for but ultimately suggests that neither he nor Henry can truly recover their former selves. Lyman in some sense understands his brother better during this outing than he has since Henry returned, but the closeness only underscores how much Henry has changed: “I felt something squeezing inside me and tightening and trying to let go all at the same time […] I knew I was feeling what Henry was going through at that moment” (187). Figuratively, Henry’s death parallels his earlier attempt to give Lyman the car in that it frees Lyman from a bond that has become unhealthy. This time, Lyman does come into his own, but he does not keep the car, which now embodies not only the brothers’ youth but also the suffering that followed. The absence of rationale when Lyman rolls the car into the river on the last page suggests newfound self-assuredness—a transformation in the throes of grief.
Indigenous Identity
Lyman is Chippewa and clearly takes pride in his ancestry. He admires his brother’s nose, which he describes as a sign of his Indigenous heritage. The long description of his face situated right next to a comment about his strong body hitches them together, showing that Indigeneity and masculinity are intertwined for Lyman. The narrative attention to nature illustrates the care for and connection to ancestral land. Growth and greenery equal goodness for Lyman. Alaska in the summer is wonderful because “things would grow up there. One day just dirt or moss, the next day flowers and long grass” (180). Henry’s strange dance in the last scene is unlike anything else “on all this green growing earth” (189).
Lyman’s distrust of the US government is likewise connected to his heritage. As he beats the car, he comments on its terrible condition with an idiom about “government promises—full of holes” (184). Young Lyman doesn’t have the language to articulate the links, but the government, trauma, and loss are complementary forces. Though mostly implicit, a long history of violence and oppression against Indigenous Americans underpins the story. For example, Lyman's remark that he is good at making money for “a Chippewa” hints at the number of Indigenous Americans who live in poverty, especially on reservations.
Yet despite Lyman’s awareness of how the US has victimized and exploited people like his brother, he frequently sees himself through a colonizer’s eyes. His remarks about the feature he most associates with his brother’s heritage—his nose—are revealing:
We liked to tease him that [the army] really wanted him for his Indian nose. He had a nose big and sharp as a hatchet, like the nose on Red Tomahawk, the Indian who killed Sitting Bull, whose profile is on signs all along the North Dakota highways (181).
Lyman’s comment about the army wanting Henry for his nose is more accurate than he probably suspects, as Indigenous Americans (like many other marginalized groups) have disproportionately served in the US military. However, what is most noteworthy is the comparison to Red Tomahawk, a member of the police force that killed Sitting Bull while attempting to arrest him for his suspected role in the Ghost Dance movement, a spiritual and political form of resistance to US colonial expansion. The person Lyman cites as the epitome of Indigenous identity is therefore a tragic figure inextricably linked to the genocide of his own people. To add insult to injury, Lyman knows Red Tomahawk’s profile because of an act of cultural appropriation—namely, its use on government signs. It is unclear how aware Lyman is of these ironies, but their presence in the story suggests the extent to which Indigenous identity has become entangled with racism.
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