| My thesis examines four novels written by Native American writers of mixed ancestry: D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded (1936), Leslie Marmom Silko's Ceremony (1976), Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine (1993), and Michael Dorris' A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (1987). In these novels, all four writers focus their attention upon the position of the "mixedblood" figure. Traditionally, the mixedblood in literature has functioned as a tragic figure, whose position "in-between" cultures has been regarded as a source of alienation. However, in these four texts, the mixedblood becomes a positive figure, a protagonist. Simultaneously positioned within different and, oftentimes, opposing cultures, the mixedblood fibres in these texts become mediators between cultures.; In focusing my attention upon the position of the mixedblood figure in these texts, I am interested, not only in the way in which these writers challenge the negative image of the mixedblood, but also in the manner in they foreground the extent to which ethnicity is socially and discursively, as opposed to biologically, constructed. As well, I also examine the extent to which, both structurally and thematically, all four texts display a preoccupation with fragment at ion and confusion over unity and certainty. Containing both Native American and Euramerican cultural codes, McNickle, Silko, Erdrich, and Dorris' novels impose what Catherine Rainwater describes as "textually encoded undecidability" upon the reader. As a result, the reader is encouraged to identify, at least provisionally, with the fragmented and marginalized position of the mixedblood characters within the texts. |
