Summary Of Margaret Atwood's The Bean Trees

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The intermingling of narrative voice, 2nd hand narrative story telling of another story or information obtained from another individual, as well as the novel’s impressive span of characters make it difficult to flesh out the plot as it happens and as it is read; however, these elements and the plague of doves symbolic blanket metamorphosis into the earth itself, highlights the Earth’s influence, and furthermore—the unseen connections between the community. The first narrator, Evelina, uses intermediaries in her relationships. In her first love she used other students to deliver her letters, and in her second love for Sister Mary Anne Buckendorf she pries at her grandfather, Mooshum, to reveal information about her she suspects she may not …show more content…

Reminders occur, such as when Geraldine while fishing with Judge Antone Bazil Coutts catches the same turtle she had previously caught while fishing with her past lover Roman. Another working domino is music, and Moshum’s brother Shamengwa’s capacity for music carrying forward to save Corwin Peace from the implications of his origins. The novel repeats the past and the intangible power of it to draw the characters to repeat what they do or how they felt. For the white community, the marginalization and displacement of hate for the Native American’s residing in the reservation is yet another repetition of past influence carried forward. There is no reason needed to associate current hatred with them; nevertheless, it carries forward and Mosshum and his 3 other Native American friends entering the house is enough justification to turn them into scapegoats for the whites’ hatred. That bubbling below the surface hate will always exist as long as the dichotomy foreign and not foreign between one race and another is able to be discerned. And although the intermingling between ethnicities foreshadows the making of one uniform race between the Natives and the whites, there will always be a Native American, a black, an Asian or Latino in whatever marginalized group comes to