Pauline's Trickster Cure in Erdrich's Tracks

Some critics have interpreted that Louise Erdrich has revitalized indigenous oral charm in Tracks. Most of such acclaim focuses on Nanapush, an old full-blood male narrator of five chapters, paying little attention to another storyteller Pauline Puyat, whose narrative covers four long odd-numbered chapters out of nine in Tracks. To define Pauline, a fifteen-year-old mixed-blood female Catholic nun-to-be, as a trickster afresh illuminates Erdrich's contribution. Traversing the delusive understanding of the trickster with the authority to preserve and inherit Native American ethnic authenticity, Pauline's trickster discourse disintegrates factitious binary opposites-true or false, European or indigenous, Christian or indigenous, good or evil, normal or abnormal, moral or immoral-and remedies post-traumatic disorder stress caused by hegemonic binarism. Evoking unbound pleasure in the readers with Pauline's schizophrenic trickster narrative, Tracks opens a post-traumatic, ecstatic path to the boundary-free unknown zone of cure.