28 pages • 56 minutes read
Louise ErdrichThe Red Convertible
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1974A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Red Convertible
Content Warning: This section contains references to war-related trauma.
The convertible represents freedom and independence: The boys can go wherever they like so long as they have gas money. It also represents a mutual future. Driving in the fixed-up car with Henry to the Red River recalls the summer road trip and the perfect happiness the brothers had together. It’s Lyman’s greatest wish to get that feeling back, and he believes in the car’s ability to make that happen.
The car also reminds the reader of young Lyman’s lack of independence—or rather, his dependence on his older brother for his sense of self and purpose. He refuses to do anything but fix the car up while Henry’s in Vietnam. He won’t accept the keys either time Henry tries to give him full ownership of the car: The first time he makes a joke, and the second time they come to blows over the issue. Lyman runs the car into the river at the end of the story, solidifying the loss of the carefree childhood he once had with Henry. However, making the choice to abandon the symbol of independence paradoxically frees Lyman from the need to define himself by this symbol, ushering in a new potential future and marking his Coming of Age.
The Television
Television, with its sedating effects and addictive potential, equals tuning out. Lyman bought the television for his family “while Henry was away” (182). Like Lyman’s refusal to drive the car without Henry, the television is his refusal to actively engage in a world without Henry in it. This plan backfires spectacularly when it becomes the only thing Henry can engage with. His stillness while watching TV, unlike those Lyman remembers fondly, teeters on the edge of chaos: “[I]t was the kind of stillness that you see in a rabbit when it freezes and before it will bolt” (183). Lyman specifically regrets buying color, because a black and white TV would be less engaging. Like the stillness TV encourages, the engagement is empty and destructive; Henry absentmindedly biting through his lip isn’t peace.
The Photograph
There’s a section break between the moment Bonita takes a picture of Lyman and Henry and the narrator’s description of the photo, not unlike the flash of a camera. The photograph sends the narrator on a tangent. Due to events that are about to unfold in the main story line, the photograph has such weight that one night, the narrator “[can’t] stay in the same room” with the picture and takes it down (186). As the reader approaches the end of the story, this brief flash forward suggests that something grim is about to happen.
The picture, like the memory of laying under the willows, is “very clear” in the narrator’s memory. Their faces contrast: Lyman’s is “right out in the sun, big and round,” but Henry’s is covered in shadows “deep as holes” (186). Both are technically smiling, although it seems to Lyman that Henry’s smile vanishes over time. The purpose of a photograph is usually to preserve the past, but this photograph predicts the imminent future, showing that the two brothers’ paths have already diverged.
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By Louise Erdrich
