The Red Convertible By Louise Erdrich

Family is one of the most important factors that shape the personality and character of its members. From a very young age children look up to the older members of their family; the older members act as their first teachers, their moral compasses, their role models. But what happens to the younger members of a family when these role models experience something traumatic, when they change. This is the question that is asked in Louise Erdrich’s The Red Convertible and Diane Thiel’s The Minefield. This story and poem show how families can both be strengthened and torn apart as a family member goes through a devastating time, and how the members of the family that look up to them can be brought closer to them, or how they can be parted even further.

Traumatic events, no matter how big or how small, effect every relationship to some extent.

They can cause changes in a loved one that family members are not prepared for or do not want, which can tear a rift between them. However, sometimes, it is up to family members to overlook the changes in their loved one in order to restore their relationship and to restore their loved one to what he or she used to be. This is the struggle that Lyman Lamartine treads with through the course of The Red Convertible. When Lyman’s older brother Henry returns from the Vietnam war he is much changed, and Lyman grapples with these changes as Henry isolates himself from the family and other people, as Lyman says, “They got to leaving him alone most of the time, and I didn’t blame them. It was a fact: Henry was jumpy and mean” (Erdrich 333). Lyman, of course, did not like the changes in Henry, as he stays: “the change was no good” (Erdrich 333). Lyman then reminisces about how he and Henry would sit for hours and talk and Henry would joke and laugh but when he came back from war he was “never comfortable sitting still anywhere but always up and moving around” and “now you couldn’t get him to laugh, or when he did it was more the sound of a man choking” (Erdrich 333). What hit Lyman the hardest was Henry’s lack of interest in the red convertible, the one thing that undeniably connected them. When Henry does not care for the car anymore, it is like he did not care for his relationship with his

brother either.
The narrator in The Minefield has similar conflict with her war-hardened father as Lyman does with Henry.

In this poem the father of the narrator had seen his own friend die in front of him due to a minefield, and as the narrator says: “He carried them with him-the minefields” (Thiel 352). However, the father could not always hide those minefields from his children. In the poem, the narrator says “He gave them to us-in the full volume of his anger” (Thiel 352). The narrator’s father often acted out his anger very violently, sometimes with his own children, as the following line reads “in the bruises we covered up with sleeves” (Thiel 352). This did weaken, or at least complicated the relationship between the father and his children because they knew “anything might explode at anytime” which means that they had to be very careful around their father in order to not set off a violent outburst (Thiel

352).
It is obvious in these two pieces that the younger family members can suffer just as much as the one struggling with a traumatic event. A family is like a chain, when one link breaks, the others fall with it. However, in a family, the other members have to weld the broken link back together in order to restore the family bond, but that is almost never an easy task. In The Red Convertible, Lyman felt that Henry was drifting away from him. The one special thing that they had in common was the red convertible, but Henry had not even looked at it since he came home from the war and that, in a way, separated the brothers; they were not as close. However, Lyman thought about the car as he wrote “the car might bring the old Henry back somehow. So I bided my time and waited my chance to interest him in the vehicle” (Erdrich 333-334). Lyman was very selfless when it came to Henry, he used a hammer to near completely destroy the car that he himself treasured in order to help his brother get through a difficult time. His plan worked and Henry began working on the car until it was in near mint condition. Toward the end of the story, Henry and Lyman go on a drive together just as they had done in the beginning before Henry left for war and Lyman says “I think it’s the old Henry again” (Erdrich 336). This shows that it is possible for families to become strong again after a tragedy, but that is not the case in The Minefield.
For the narrator in The Minefield, it is very difficult to bring her father back to what he used to be like. Since the narrator obviously did not know her father when he was a child, she has no way of knowing what he was like before the incident, how he is in the poem is the only version of him that she knows. Unlike Lyman, who knew that the car could coax Henry away from constantly thinking about his traumatic experience, the narrator can do nothing but understand the reasons why her father is the way he is. In the poem, the narrator says: “He carried them underneath his good intentions” (Thiel 352). This shows that the children understand why he acts this way and that he does not do it simply to be cruel, and sometimes that is the only thing one can do to help a loved, to simply understand what they have been through.
Finally, what long lasting effects does a traumatic event have on a family? Does it stay the same forever, with a loved one never the same as before? In these two pieces, it shows that a relationship never really “dies” it is only tested. With Lyman in regards to Henry, he knows that Henry is never going to be the same, that there is always going to be a dark shadow following him, but Lyman did his best to help Henry. In the very end, after Henry drowns, Lyman drives the convertible into the water. This is symbolic of Lyman “giving” the car back to Henry and showing that their relationship still went on. It is much the same as when henry returns from the war and Lyman thought the “old Henry” was gone forever, but by giving Henry the car to work on, their relationship was able to come back, in a way, to how it used to be. In The Minefield, however, the relationship between the narrator and her father never changes. Unlike Lyman, there is no other version of her loved one that she can bring back. Furthermore, since the relationship remains stagnant, the narrator always feels the same about her father as she did as a child: “In the way we still expect, years later and continents away, that anything might explode at any time” (Thiel 352). This does not mean that the relationship is poor or weak, only that the relationship could never be as close as they might have wanted it to be.
The Red Convertible and The Minefield both show how families manage when an important member fights with a traumatic event. Although they display different circumstances, they both teach a lesson about the power of familial relationships. Although The Red Convertible talks of helping loved ones that have changed for the worse, and The Minefield speaks of accepting loved ones in spite of the inability to help them, both of them speak out about how family ties can never truly be broken by a traumatic event, only tested by one.