A Study Of Justice In Louise Erdrich’s The Round House From The Perspective Of Suspense Narrative

Louis Erdrich is one of the most influential representatives of the second tide of the Native American Renaissance.Her fourteenth novel,The Round House,published in 2012,won the 63 rd National Book Award.From the first-person perspective of Joe,Erdrich tells the story of Joe’s pursuit of justice after his mother,Geraldine,is raped on a North Dakota reservation by Linden,a white man.The book focuses on the“plundered justice” suffered by the Ojibwa people under colonial oppression and Joe’s quest for justice through “violence against violence”.When the law is out of balance,the author presents a realistic representation of the injustices and abuses suffered by Native American women and calls for the healing function of restorative justice,which she hopes to establish eventually.From the perspective of suspense narrative,this thesis interprets the embodiment of “plundered justice” narrated in judicial justice,ethical justice,and gender justice from the perspectives of narrative information,narrative perspectives,and narrative structures and analyzes the specific suspenseful plots.It aims to discover how the author uses suspense narrative to mobilize readers to defend justice in the reservation in peaceful ways.This thesis is divided into five chapters.The first chapter briefly introduces Louis Erdrich and The Round House.Secondly,it summarizes the research status of the author and The Round House at home and abroad.It expounds on the development process of narratology and the theoretical framework of information delay and suppression,first-person narrative,and embedded narrative.Finally,it states the central idea and the significance of this thesis.The second chapter discusses judicial justice from the suspense narrative plots and researches how the narrator shows the“plundered justice” suffered by the Indians under the colonial legal system through delayed and suppressed information to arouse readers’ reflection on the way to pursue justice.The third chapter discusses ethical justice from the narrative perspectives,explores the suspense narrative of animal ethical justice and family ethical justice from different internal focalizations,and analyzes the different ways of interpreting justice from different perspectives.The fourth chapter discusses gender justice from the perspective of suspense narrative structures.It explores the “plundered justice”suffered by women in the embedded narrative event from the perspective of different feelings of perpetrators,victims,and readers in the story.The fifth chapter summarizes the full text and reveals that the traditional revenge road of “fighting violence with violence” represented by Joe does not work,and the Indian people can only recover the “plundered justice” by establishing “restorative justice” represented by Judge Basil.This thesis interprets The Round House from the perspective of a suspense narrative and tries to provide a new reference for the study of Erdrich’s novels.While exploring the theme of justice,it shows the suspense charm of Indian detective novels.