The red convertible
... he was a completely different person. Their relationship was not the same as it used to be before. Therefore Lyman did all those things to bring Henry back to health, e.g. he decided to damage the car they both owned / the red convertible / so that Henry would have to fix it. Henry knew that but he was not angry with him. The whole story is told only from Lyman´s point of view so it makes it sometimes very hard for the reader to understand Henry´s thoughts and feelings. In many parts he seemed to me to be quite a strange character and it was difficult to know what is going on in his mind. Therefore I could only quess what was the reason for him commiting the suicide in the end of the story. In my opinion he was so much influenced by his experiences from the war that it was simply impossible for him to live his life as he used to. He became a very quiet, uncommunicative, devastated person. Although ´´the whole war was solved, for him it would keep on going.´´ As I have mentioned, the story takes place in 1974, the year of The Vietnam War which lasted from 1959 to 1975. The United States believed that if Vietnam came under communist control, communism would quickly spread throught Southeast Asia. And by means of Henry, Erdrich describes the difficulties that many veterans from this war and their relatives had to face and how it affected their lives. The Red Convertible also focuses on the characters whose worlds are a combination of different cultures because they are both Native American and American. I would like to describe Lyman´s transformation from a young man to an adult. He was trying to define who he really is and what is important to him. I think that he must have been quite confused by the environment in which he lived. Because he could choose between two different lifestyles, his own native culture and the culture of white people. At the beginning he seemed to favour the whites, since they enabled him to get into their business. E.g. he was perhaps the only native to drive a convertible in his reservation, or he had a chance to manage a Café at the age of 16. The white society at that time had a great power so this might have attracted Lyman at first. Many things of a white culture have penetrated into the life of natives, such as a television, that Henry had bought for him and his family. When his brother returned home from war he believes that the white culture would help him to cure Henry. So he ...