Hi, I need help with essay on Love Medicine. Paper must be at least 1000 words. Please, no plagiarized work!Download file to see previous pages... Love MedicineLove Medicine begins with June Kashpaw w

Hi, I need help with essay on Love Medicine. Paper must be at least 1000 words. Please, no plagiarized work!

Love Medicine

Love Medicine begins with June Kashpaw walking through the streets of Williston in an attempt to kill time before boarding the bus back to the reservation. Unfortunately she gets sidetracked thinking she see's someone familiar to her and ends up missing the bus thus getting stranded in a snow storm and freezing to death before she makes it back to the reservation. Her character is the key figure throughout the story, although she dies early on. It is her spirit that is sensed and felt rather vividly through the many facet areas of the other characters lives. It is this key element of the novel that seems to drive the characters forward and compels the reader to continue as well.

Through reading on we learn June had two sons. One was accepted well and looked upon as a legitimate individual while the other seemed shunned and alienated in some ways due to his illegitimacy. These two young men were known as, "King" and "Lipsha".

In the story we see King portrayed as an unruly person with an almost untamed wildness in him. Besides this fact there lies a sense of hopelessness in him at times. a lack of understanding of his true identifiable self.

. He is ridiculed because he leaves the reservation to purse his own educational interests and marries a white girl instead of a Native American. His Grandmother is none to happy with it although she was married to a Swedish man herself. King is very much wrapped up in a color trap and blames the white man for many of the changed characteristics of his tribe. He does harbor violent tendencies and at points seems out of control in his anger but seems to flounder in regards as to how to change the outcome of it all as so many of the male characters represent.

While growing up he is Lipsha's tormentor, all the while seeming to be plotting the most cruelest and vilest acts against Lipsha. Perhaps he acted out because of jealousy or insecurity or maybe simply because they were so very different. Unbeknownst to Lipsha was the fact that King was actually his brother. Lipsha was relieved of his tormentor when King had to leave the reservation to go and fight in the Viet-Nam war. After that the separation between them carried on through a great distance in the novel.

King is just one of the male figures in this story differing from Lipsha in that he and others are blasted by drink, idleness and war. One life after another ends in suicide or madness, in prison or the old folks home. Though through Lipsha we see instances where a collective sense is trying to be made in understanding what is happening to cause the declining collective fates of many of the male figures.

Love Medicine does not seem to have a "central conflict or protagonist" (Flavin, p.57). What it does exemplify however, is the basic instincts of survival and making it on your own through many adversities. It portrays these characters existing in a world where they feel "God and Government seem to have forsaken them" (Flavin, p.57). When they have been left to their own devices of how to live their lives they seem to buckle under the pressure, especially the men who are depicted as "floundering" fish.