A study guide for Louise Erdrich's "The Bingo Palace"

By Gale and Cengage

A study guide for Louise Erdrich's "The Bingo Palace", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students series. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: May 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535827720

Book preview

12

The Bingo Palace

Louise Erdrich

1994

Introduction

Louise Erdrich's The Bingo Palace tells a realistic story about the growth of casinos and gambling on American Indian reservations. But Erdrich also explodes that world into a fantastic landscape of magical realism to provide a post-modern exploration of the place of the American Indian in the contemporary world. Almost all of Erdrich's body of work collectively forms a single coherent narrative about the people living on a North Dakota Indian reservation, and everyone and everything connected to them. Her self-avowed concern in her fiction is to explore the world of her childhood and her ancestors, such that her oeuvre is a version, a translation into narrative, of her family history.

The Bingo Palace (1994) is set at the time it was written, in the early 1990s, and details episodes in the lives of characters Erdrich has chronicled in other writings throughout the twentieth century, as well as their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. In some respects, Erdrich's works superficially resemble a soap opera, with innumerable threads of plot about different characters occasionally coming together and spinning apart, but this is because she is describing the life of a community rather than that of an individual. Readers should be aware that the novel includes a detailed, though nongraphic, description of a rape, making the book less suitable for younger teenagers.

Author Biography

Erdrich was born on June 7, 1954, in Little Falls, Minnesota. Her father, Ralph, was of German descent, while her mother, Rita, was of mixed heritage, her father being the tribal chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewas. They both worked as schoolteachers for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, mostly in Wahpeton, South Dakota. From 1972 to 1976, Erdrich attended Dartmouth College, where she earned a BA; in 1979 she received a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University. She put herself through school by working odd jobs.

Erdrich met her future husband, Michael Dorris, at Dartmouth, where he was a professor of Native American studies. They would eventually have three children together, also raising three children whom Dorris had adopted as a single father. Dorris contributed important research to the problem of preventing fetal alcohol syndrome (which afflicted all three of his adopted children) among children born on reservations.

As Erdrich had more and more success publishing poems and short stories, she and Dorris collaborated on a number of projects, including the novel The Crown of Columbus (1991). Dorris may also have contributed to some of the early novels published under Erdrich's name. Dorris eventually involved the couple in scandal when it became clear that he was not, as he claimed, an Indian, and because of accusations by two of their adopted children that Dorris had abused them. Their son Reynold was run down by a car and killed in