The Red Convertible: Main Ideas

It is painful to watch a loved one suffer.

Henry Junior’s suffering is portrayed through Lyman’s perspective, whose descriptions of the shift in Henry Junior’s personality are wracked with fear and worry. Similarly, Mom feels powerless to help Henry Junior, and friends who visit are so uncomfortable around him that they distance themselves. No one knows how to help him, but their concern is palpable. The argument Lyman and Henry Junior get into after Henry Junior sees the damage to the red convertible is full of veiled meaning. Lyman does not know how to directly communicate his concern and worry. Instead of telling his brother that it is painful to watch him suffer, Lyman smashes up the red convertible and waits for Henry Junior to notice. Lyman’s performative anger during the argument over the car’s condition is meant to convey love and concern, and Henry Junior’s performative anger is an acknowledgment. At the river, Lyman and Henry Junior get into a violent fistfight instead of speaking about their respective fears and pain. Lyman’s narrative often jumps forward in time to his pained reflections on Henry Junior’s fate to illustrate how Henry Junior’s death permanently affects him. Lyman hides Bonita’s photograph of Henry Junior in a brown bag in the back of a closet as if ritualistically burying his pain over his brother’s death. Lyman’s guilt at having been unable to help his brother compounds his grief and it impacts him for the rest of his life.

The American Dream is a fallacy.

The optimism of the story’s opening contrasts with its tragic end to make a political statement about the fallacy of the American Dream. On the surface, Lyman’s ability to make money is evidence that hard work and merit are rewarded, and that the American Dream is functioning as it claims to. However, Lyman is aware that an unusual amount of luck is the secret to his success, which is contrary to the lie of merit-based success sold by the American Dream. A red Oldsmobile convertible is considered a classic American car that is synonymous with upward mobility and freedom. Lyman and Henry Junior’s ability to purchase the car is a status symbol on the reservation where they live. However, the fact that they must join their finances to afford it suggests that the American Dream is not truly attainable for most citizens. Henry Junior pays for his portion of the car with earnings from his factory job, a quintessential symbol of the moral American worker. In contrast, Lyman pays for his portion with the bankroll from the insurance payout from the Joliet Café's destruction. Lyman’s insurance payout is an example of the toxic glorification of American capitalism. Erdrich’s inclusion of these contrasting payments is a criticism of a system that prays on the dreams of the hardest-working and most vulnerable citizens.

The freedom the red convertible represents is both literal and ironic. The American Dream defines itself, in part, by the idea of personal freedom. In reality, American political forces often strip its citizens of many meaningful personal freedoms. For most Americans, owning a car is a necessity for mobility, and this is true for Lyman and Henry Junior. However, the freedom the red convertible allows them does not extend to avoiding military service in a morally questionable war. Henry Junior is ultimately a pawn on the geo-political stage which destroys him and his family. The fact that Lyman and Henry Junior are Native American also highlights the continued trampling of the rights and freedoms of Native American people by the United States government. Henry Junior’s tragic fate and its impact on his family directly challenges the oft-touted claim that the United States is the ultimate protector of freedom. Erdrich exposes the grim hypocrisy of the American government and posits that the American Dream is a fallacy and not worth protecting at all.

Native American communities are negatively impacted by United States politics.

Henry Junior’s traumatic military experience illustrates the larger impact United States politics have on Native American communities. Lyman holds no ill will toward the Vietnamese soldiers, and it is clear he does not understand or care to know the geo-political reasons behind the war. Yet it is Henry Junior and Lyman’s family that wind up bearing the consequences of the war. Lyman describes Henry Junior as large and muscular with strong Native American features and cites his physicality and background as a reason the military makes him a marine. Although Lyman presents this observation as a joke, the detail implies an uncomfortable truth about the United States’ long history of exploiting and mistreating Native Americans. After Henry Junior returns from the war, he no longer matters. He is forgotten by the very government that is responsible for his trauma. The only doctor near enough to help Henry Junior is a white man with a grudge against his mother. The doctor’s name, Moses Pillager, doubly suggests that the man cannot be trusted because it evokes the history of pillaging white men since Europeans first set foot on American soil. Similarly, Lyman and his mother worry that bringing Henry Junior to a hospital means they will pump him full of drugs and he won’t be able to return home. Their distrust of yet another American-run system is completely understandable given the historical record between the United States and Native American communities.

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