Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1998. [Vol. 5.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 25)

Studies - Robert Murray Davis: Multiple Voices in The Death of Bernadette Lefthand

view of the causes of Tom's death and Anderson's decline. The first helps to establish the relationship between the brothers: Tom is steady and sober, Anderson's good angel to Emmett's bad; Anderson has a tendency to drink and show off. It also foreshadows Tom's death: Anderson tells Tom to stay alert for "any of those stray livestocks that might be xing each other out in the middle of this road," and Tom responds that "I expect you to keep me awake" (59). Just before the fatal crash, described in italics, Anderson is asleep. But as far as the white state trooper is concerned, in the ensuing scene in roman type, "it's just another one of your typical reservation one-vehicle accidents" (162), almost as common as deaths from alcoholism and suicide. These objective voices are important to an understanding of what happens and why and how it does so, but the two first-person narrators dominate the novel. Their purpose is not, as Nelson thinks, to "sustain suspense in the mystery." As far as Grade Lefthand, Bernadette's sister, and Starr Stubbs, Bernadette's white employer and friend, can tell, there is no mystery: she was murdered in a drunken rage by her husband, Anderson George, who then commits suicide. Nor can there be any suspense: Bernadette is already dead when the novel begins. Both accounts are retrospective. If Gracie and Starr were characters in a mystery novel, they would be witnesses, but Querry establishes them not as witnesses to but as survivors of a crime. In their struggle to understand what has happened, Gracie and Starr remember, speculate, and mourn. These narratives are central, not ancillary, to their tellers' function: to provide information about the character, setting, and situation from the contrasting viewpoints of a sixteen-year-old TaosApache girl and a sophisticated, somewhat jaded New York model transplanted after marriage to a country and western singer to Dulce, New Mexico. Starr is so loosely connected with the plot that some readers think her character unnecessary or over-developed. Querry makes some attempt to integrate her into the story line: Gracie thinks for a time that she is somehow associated with the beginning of the troubles, and Starr does feel guilty about inviting Anderson in for a drink when he picks up Bernadette from work. But nothing comes of these suggestions, and Starr's real purpose in the novel is to represent a 60