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 …

…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"