Page 13 - GALIET BEING´S FLEUR: Eldrich IV
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In his eloquent articulation, we learn how contradictory is Nanapush for he, as teller of tales, as the agent for communal identity, paradoxically, embodies his own “gabbling,” criticism and unjust rejection of Pauline and others who do not conform to his vision. Through his own “cackle,” he becomes a trickster, an impostor: he can’t immaculately represent those “facts” (although he does insist he is “...careful with his facts” (Erdrich 39) for he is aware that sensory perceptions are not to be trusted. Although Nanapush seems too aware of the dangers of believing and spreading rumors, in repeating and recounting them to Lulu: “Not two days and that story was on every tongue...as if repetition equaled truth...until inventions were known as fact...until it came back reshaped and enlarged by a hundred pairs of lips” (Erdrich 215) continues to propagate them by serving as an agent of “unwilling” or perhaps of willing misrepresentation.
It is evident that Nanapush is incapable of having “all the facts” and of reading “Fleur’s mind:” he is not omnipercipient. Inasmuch as he tries, Nanapush is left with bare clues, for he wonders, among many other things, “...how Fleur sleeps, or if she sleeps at all. Why should she? She does without so many things. The company of the living. Ammunition for her gun.” (Erdrich 9). Further, Nanapush’s melancholic (mis)interpretation of Fleur’s solitary nature, as if she were “missing” something, is highly subjective. Is Fleur really lacking something primordial in her existence? And if she were so, how would Nanapush really know what that would be, if according
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