The Sentence

Louise Erdrich

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-8

Chapters 9-13

Chapters 14-18

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Book Club Questions

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Doors

In The Sentence, doors symbolize pathways between different places and spaces of mind. The doors of Birchbark Books are painted blue to symbolize a safe space free of evil, dark spirits, and sadness. Flora’s ghost finally finds release from the store through two doors: the entrance and exit to the confessional, and the blue door that leads her out of the store. By entering and exiting through these doors, Flora’s ghost finds movement and the possibility of a new place. When she learns that she’s not stuck in the store, she finds her way out. Erdrich uses doors as an important symbol of movement, possibility, and freedom, as evident when Tookie reaches a resolution in her most central internal conflicts and needs a new source of inspiration and challenge. Erdrich provides encouragement via an open door, beckoning Tookie to enter or exit through it. Moreover, Tookie’s isolation in prison is doorless. She’s confined by bars she can’t open or close herself. This inability to move with autonomy heightens the lack of freedom Tookie suffers in prison. Additionally, books are a type of door in this novel because they lead to other feelings, places, and people.

Birchbark Books

The bookstore is both a setting and a symbolic space. It’s a safe haven for Tookie, who finds a home there after her release from prison. Birchbark Books provides Tookie with friends, stories, confidence, and employment. The employees are a mix of diverse people who all share a deep connection to Indigenous American history, culture, and language. The employees at Birchbark Books don’t judge each other for their spiritual quirks, oddities, and various affects. They support one another through turbulent times and form a team against the one-off customers who come in with offensive or ignorant questions about Indigenous literature, in which the bookstore specializes. In addition to being a haven for its employees, Birchbark Books is a fortress that preserves Indigenous American literature and history. Founded and owned by Indigenous author Louise Erdrich (the author of The Sentence), Birchbark Books is a fictional and real-life setting where people gather to honor and remember Indigenous American culture—and to keep its traditions and evolution alive. The bookstore is the setting of one of Tookie’s most immediate external conflicts: the haunting by Flora’s ghost. Birchbark Books is full of symbolic meaning, which makes it both a setting and a symbol.

Bodies

The Sentence uses bodies symbolically. When Tookie transports Budgie’s dead body, she commits both a legal crime and a spiritual affront. The misuse and abuse of Budgie’s body symbolizes Tookie’s passion and poor decision-making, and it follows her subconsciously for many years afterward. Budgie’s body is a weight that Tookie carries with her. Juxtaposing this weight is Jarvis’s innocent body, which warms Tookie and helps her learn how to treat bodies with sensitivity and gentleness. Holding Jarvis’s tiny baby body grounds Tookie and helps keep her internal and external conflicts in perspective. Bodies are especially symbolic in the novel because of the history of desecrated Indigenous American burial sites. When Asema and Tookie are approached by a white woman who brags about her family’s ownership of stolen Indigenous land and the skeletons they found on the property, she hits a nerve and reminds Asema and Tookie of the onslaught of pain and desecration that white people wrought on Indigenous Americans. The woman returns the skeletons to Asema and Tookie, and they can then make reparations for those bodies, an important end to the cycle of violence that the skeletons endured. Bodies, according to Erdrich, must be respected, honored, and held in their rightful place. The dangers inherent in moving or desecrating bodies include violence, lack of self-esteem, curses, hauntings, and restlessness.