POSTMODERN IDENTITY IN ROBERT KROETSCH’S GONE INDIAN
POSTMODERN IDENTITY IN ROBERT KROETSCH’S GONE INDIAN

Summary/Abstract: Jeremy Sadness, the Manhattan born protagonist of Gone Indian goes west into the specific border space “where the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint triumphant” (F.J.Turner) as the epigraph tells the reader. The space of unrestraint where Jeremy’s quest takes place is both geographic and psychic-as the action is set in Notikiween, near Edmonton, during the Winter Carnival. Hence at a “realistic” level Jeremy is a postmodern hero of multiple identities - Ph.D. student, Winter King, frozen snowmobile rider, winning snowshoe racer, lover to Jill, enraptured lover to Bea, arbitrarily arrested defendant brought before a Polar Bear judge, merry-maker in a funeral parlor. But at the symbolic level his journey takes us in the archetypal world of myth. Guided by a magpie, by what can be taken as his tutelary spirit - the buffalo, and the wise white Bea(r) he has a shaman’s experience and enters the realm of Indian spirituality and disappears in the timeless world of myth, his vanishing into the snow and ice of the Canadian winter remaining an undecidable issue – accidental death, faked death? The rich use of parody and the combination of two unreliable narrators reflects also the crisis of traditional narrative devices and Kroetsch’s own quest for new postmodern forms.

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