The Red Convertible Symbolism
Literary critic Marvin Magalaner has stated that in Louise Erdrich's
Love Medicine, "water is the all-pervasive symbolic link with the past
[...] and with the natural environment," whereas "the unnatural
present is epitomized by the automobile" (101). But in the chapter of
Love Medicine entitled "The Red Convertible"--a chapter often
anthologized separately as a short story--just the opposite is the
case: The automobile is associated with a more natural state of
affairs--farther in the past, whereas …
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…into the river it is once again personified:
the headlights "reach in [...] searching," still lighted even after
the car is underwater (154). And just as they did Henry, the surging
waters overwhelm the convertible, shorting the wires and bringing
darkness. The unnatural turbulence of the present has overwhelmed the
natural repose of the past, and at the end "there is only the water,
the sound of it going and running and going and running and running"
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