(De)konstrukcija roda u romanima Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich is an important contemporary Native American writer of mixed heritage, known for her peculiar narrative style that employs intratextuality and the use of multiple narrators, presenting the readers with narrative crossovers and the possibility to perceive her fictional world from a variety of perspectives. One of the prominent themes that Erdrich explores in her novels is the perception of femininity and fluid gender identity. Her novels Love Medicine (1984) and Tracks (1988) introduce certain female characters whose looks and personalities can be compared to those of traditional Native American archetypes the berdache and the trickster the figures with no fixed identity that combine elements of various cultures, worlds, and even genders, and live in marginal and liminal spaces. This paper discusses the concept of the trickster in Love Medicine and Tracks as a tool for deconstructing the stereotypes about Native American women and the Western concept of gender roles and gender identity, observable both as an element of characterization and as a narrative strategy. It focuses on the characters of Fleur Pillager, June Morrissey, Lulu Nanapush, and Marie Kashpaw, whose identity is liminal and fluid as they incorporate both the feminine and the masculine traits. In other to uncover these characters' berdache/trickster nature, the analysis pays special attention to their physical appearance, personality, character, social status, relationship with other characters, as well as their ability to transcend both the physical and the narrative boundaries. Finally, it defines Louise Erdrich's unique technique of narrative fragmentation and playfulness as an important indicator of the trickster discourse