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

the one in which Anderson triumphs; Bernadette recalls it and vainly hopes, by making Anderson remember, to get him to stop drinking. In the brief final episode, Gracie tells of the circumstances of Anderson's suicide and her plans to move to California before delivering her valedictory lines, an echo of the novel's opening: I feel like my whole life is just about over with. Like it's already gone past me. And I'm just barely sixteen. (214) Grade's beginning and closing speeches, enclosing as they do the two powwows featuring the doomed lovers, indicate that she not only establishes a framework but, like Charlie Marlow in Heart of Darkness and any number of Jamesian observers, occupies a central place within it. She is the most fully developed character, hers the major narrative voice, hers the clearest awareness of her circumstances and the means by which she must confront them. However, Grade's is not the only voice, nor hers the only tragedy. Tom, Anderson, Bernadette, and presumably Emmett have suffered the consequences of what the next-to-last epigraph, placed just before the catastrophe, calls the "imbalance" created "by indulging in excesses, having improper contact with dangerous powers," behavior that results in "conflict, disharmony, disorder, evil, sickness of the body and mind, ugliness, misfortune and/or disaster..." (165). Starr has suffered the loss of her friend and gained a limited awareness, but her knowledge will apparently not cause her to change her life for the better. The other narrative voices and the audience, presumably white, may contemplate but cannot alter or be directly touched by tragic events that occur not because of the white world's incursion or even Navajo witchcraft but of human flaws and passions that are more Indian in texture than in essence. I am indebted to the students in my critical reading and writing course who read and discussed the book with me and to Professors Geary Hobson, Alan Velie, and Jeanette Harris, who read an early draft of this essay. 64