73 pages • 2 hours read
Richard WagameseMedicine Walk
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary
Frank finds Eldon in a dilapidated rooming house with a “whore” (14) named Deirdre. Eldon does not recognize Frank at first; it’s been several years since they last saw each other. Eldon offers Frank a “tailor-made” (13) cigarette, but Frank prefers to make his own. Even though Eldon is Frank’s father, Frank doesn’t know Eldon in the way that he knows Bunky, therefore “dad” is only a word to Frank. Eldon and Frank go out to get something to eat.
Chapter 4 Summary
Frank and Eldon go to a “dank hovel” (17) of a bar, and Frank pays Eldon’s overdue tab. The two discuss a river valley where Eldon used to work as a logger and where Frank has hunted. Eldon reveals that he is dying, and he wants Frank to take him into the wilderness and give him the proper burial of an Ojibway warrior: “You ain’t no warrior” (23), Frank says to Eldon, after picking up and sniffing Eldon’s bottle of whiskey. Frank, angry with Eldon, accuses him of skirting his responsibility as a father. When Eldon tells Frank that Eldon's life stories are “all I got to give ya” (23), Frank replies that it “[a]in’t never gonna be enough” (23).
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
These chapters focus on the damage of modern life upon traditional Indigenous communities. Frank represents a way of life based on connection to the land, and Eldon represents the destruction of that life through industrialization and negative cultural practices, such as alcoholism. Frank’s purity, commitment to natural living, and rejection of the white man's culture underscore the damaging elements of modernity.
Frank is self-sufficient, but Eldon is in debt to whites and at their mercy for survival. Frank hunts the river valley to survive on his own, while Eldon worked for whites logging the valley’s natural resources for their profit. Eldon has become dependent on alcohol and is paying the price with his early death and the lost opportunity to be a good father. This failure also represents the larger loss suffered by men like Eldon: In abandoning Frank, Eldon has also abandoned the traditional ways of his people.
Now that Eldon is approaching his imminent death, he wishes to make amends and recover a connection to the traditions of his people. Eldon desires the proper burial of a warrior, and Frank is the perfect person to help Eldon do that. Unlike Eldon who retires to his squalid living conditions, Frank is the one who returns to the stable to sleep with his horse, leaving the sulphur smell of the mill town behind and following “the stars north through town” (24).
Related Titles
By Richard Wagamese
