The Red Convertible By Louise Erdrich

Family is one of the most important factors that shape the personality and character of its members. From a very young age children look up to the older members of their family; the older members act as their first teachers, their moral compasses, their role models. But what happens to the younger members of a family when these role models experience something traumatic, when they change. This is the question that is asked in Louise Erdrich’s The Red Convertible and Diane Thiel’s The Minefield. This story and poem show how families can both be strengthened and torn apart as a family member goes through a devastating time, and how the members of the family that look up to them can be brought closer to them, or how they can be parted even further.

They can cause changes in a loved one that family members are not prepared for or do not want, which can tear a rift between them. However, sometimes, it is up to family members to overlook the changes in their loved one in order to restore their relationship and to restore their loved one to what he or she used to be. This is the struggle that Lyman Lamartine treads with through the course of The Red Convertible. When Lyman’s older brother Henry returns from the Vietnam war he is much changed, and Lyman grapples with these changes as Henry isolates himself from the family and other people, as Lyman says, “They got to leaving him alone most of the time, and I didn’t blame them. It was a fact: Henry was jumpy and mean” (Erdrich 333). Lyman, of course, did not like the changes in Henry, as he stays: “the change was no good” (Erdrich 333). Lyman then reminisces about how he and Henry would sit for hours and talk and Henry would joke and laugh but when he came back from war he was “never comfortable sitting still anywhere but always up and moving around” and “now you couldn’t get him to laugh, or when he did it was more the sound of a man choking” (Erdrich 333). What hit Lyman the hardest was Henry’s lack of interest in the red convertible, the one thing that undeniably connected them. When Henry does not care for the car anymore, it is like he did not care for his relationship with his

In this poem the father of the narrator had seen his own friend die in front of him due to a minefield, and as the narrator says: “He carried them with him-the minefields” (Thiel 352). However, the father could not always hide those minefields from his children. In the poem, the narrator says “He gave them to us-in the full volume of his anger” (Thiel 352). The narrator’s father often acted out his anger very violently, sometimes with his own children, as the following line reads “in the bruises we covered up with sleeves” (Thiel 352). This did weaken, or at least complicated the relationship between the father and his children because they knew “anything might explode at anytime” which means that they had to be very careful around their father in order to not set off a violent outburst (Thiel