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The Plunge of the Brave

Summary: The Plunge of the Brave

Narrated in the first-person voice by Nector Kashpaw, this story traces his life as a young man in the 1930s to the present in 1957. After school, he goes to Hollywood because he was cast in a Western film, playing a Native American who falls off a horse and dies. Nector is then hired by an elderly woman painter to pose for a painting, almost nude, that she titles The Plunge of the Brave. The painting becomes famous and Nector earns $2000, but he sacrifices his integrity. He returns home to live with his mother, near his brother Eli, and falls for Lulu Nanapush before meeting Marie, who changes the course of his life, although he still holds affection for Lulu. Nector and Marie have lots of babies, lose three to death, and even start taking in other children besides their own. Nector must work hard to support so many children. He becomes chairman of the tribe. The weight of playing that role as well as supporting his family lessens him. Seventeen years go by like a rapid river.

In July 1952, Nector experiences a profound moment of stillness and realizes that he still has feelings for Lulu. He drives into town to discover two unexpected trucks filled with seventeen tons of surplus butter that he must deal with. Lulu happens to drive by. Nector notices the buttons on Lulu’s dress and asks her to help him move boxes of butter into her air-conditioned car for delivery around the reservation. When Nector compliments the petunias Lulu grows in her yard, she replies that they are none of his business. When they finish passing out the surplus butter, Lulu wants to drive to a lookout to take in the view. At first Nector resists but then agrees. At the lookout, they rub butter on each other and make love. 

At home, Marie asks where their butter is. Nector left it in Lulu’s car. That admission, along with the smell of butter on his body, reveals Nector’s guilt. For the next five years, he works as a janitor and visits Lulu once every week, leading a double life, trying to please two strong women. Lulu has a baby who looks like a Kashpaw. When Lulu sees Bev Lamartine, Nector feels jealous. After making love roughly to her one night, Nector goes to a lake and dives to the bottom, naked, vowing never to see Lulu again. As chairman, he must sign a document that relinquishes Lulu’s land to build a factory. He tries to visit her, but she rejects him. 

One August night, Nector pens two letters, one saying he is leaving Marie, the other proposing to Lulu, and locks them in his briefcase before he slips into bed with his wife. The next morning, he imagines Lulu with Bev and plunges into action. Nector sets Marie’s letter in the kitchen and goes to Lulu’s house where no one is home. He waits for her return, smokes cigarettes, and rereads his letter of proposal, agitated and anxious. Nector accidentally drops a lit cigarette onto the balled-up letter, the paper ignites, and soon the whole house is engulfed in flames. He does nothing to stop it. As Nector runs from the hot flames, he feels his desire for Lulu burning out of him and sees a vision of Marie at fourteen, a bright breast-plated angel who lifts him up and bids him escape. 

Analysis: The Plunge of the Brave

The title of this story has a dual meaning. The “brave” refers to someone who is courageous, but it also is a term for a Native American warrior. The painting with this title is poignant for Nector because it, like the Western films of the time, depicts a Native American falling to his death, which Nector suggests reinforces Custer’s brutal notion that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” The painting’s title captures the plot of the story because here, Nector considers taking the plunge of leaving his wife of seventeen years for the woman he truly loves, Lulu Lamartine. He grapples with his own courage and integrity, caught between two strong women.

Water imagery dominates this story which fittingly ends in fire. The painting depicts a Native American falling into a rocky river. Nector describes his internal conflict as if time is rushing around him like water around a rock, but he is not durable. He is being smoothed away, bit by bit, by his own discontent. In his youth, he loved the book Moby Dick and identified with Ishmael. To wash himself of Lulu, he literally plunges into a lake, diving to the bottom, but the water bounces him back up. Water becomes the symbol of the flow of Nector’s life, and like a river that branches in two separate directions, he is fraught with indecision.

The ending of this story, therefore, is surprising, or perhaps perfect, because it ends in fire instead of water. Lulu is gone but Marie appears as a vision of her younger self, infused with an immortal glow, like a Greek goddess whose arms are white-hot spears. She is the first of several ghostly apparitions that will visit the living characters in the novel and a representation of the past being fully part of the present.  

In this story, Nector embodies the Native American who is exploited by white culture, especially in art. In both the film and the painting, he is reduced to caricature, stripped of both his dignity and his clothes. This condition contributes to Erdrich’s ongoing theme of assimilation and prejudice, showing the toll that this degradation takes on the individual and the community on the reservation. It is important to note that Nector does not remain in this exploited role. He returns to the reservation and becomes a tribal leader. Although he exploits others, he does not remain a victim himself.

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