The Sentence

The Sentence begins in a moment of high action and tension. The narrator, Tookie, participates in a crime without thinking through the legalities of her actions. For Tookie, it’s a crime of passion because she moves the dead body for a woman to whom she’s attracted. The incident therefore immediately characterizes Tookie as someone with a deep capacity for love and commitment to do things for others. The swiftness of her arrest after the crime highlights how small her community is (where everyone knows everyone else’s business) and provides a quick plot arc that heightens the narrative’s drama in the first few pages. In addition, the short time between the crime and the arrest emphasizes Erdrich’s message about how swiftly life can change and underscores one of the book’s major themes, The Unpredictability of Life. Tookie’s committing this crime is in itself surprising because it’s in direct opposition to her spiritual culture and, given her intellect, is an alarming mistake. Thus, the crime is central to Tookie’s narrative development but juxtaposes her character and identity.

Tookie’s arrest turns her into a statistic. Studies of the Minnesota prison system show that the incarceration rate of women increased 19-fold in the decades between the 1970s and the 2000s. This dramatic increase highlights a broken system in which space, rehabilitation, and resources are insufficient for women in crisis. As an Ojibwe (or Chippewa) woman, Tookie isn’t just another female prisoner but an Indigenous American female prisoner experiencing the cycles of abuse and incarceration to which the Indigenous community is repeatedly subjected. Her status as an Indigenous American prisoner is heightened because she was arrested by a fellow Indigenous person—her future husband, Pollux. Thus, both Pollux and Tookie are forced into white-dominated narratives about Indigenous American criminality that don’t ring true to their real characters. Ultimately, Tookie is saved by the lawyer her reservation hires for her defense, which highlights the power of community. Tookie is both thrown into trouble by members of her community and rescued by that community.

Erdrich uses Tookie’s experience in incarceration to emphasize an overall message about the power of literature. Tookie reimagines her most beloved novels while in prison, a tactic that helps keep her sane through the traumatic isolation. Tookie’s connection to literature is a form of escapism. Upon her release from prison, she again finds a safe space in literature when she’s hired at the bookstore. The bookstore provides Tookie with a second chance at life, emphasizing that book lovers are empathetic and willing to understand people’s different layers. The author of The Sentence, Louise Erdrich, casts herself as a secondary character in the novel. This inclusion—and Erdrich’s making Birchbark Books, her real-life bookstore, a central location in the novel—subverts typical literary norms of fiction, infusing The Sentence with autobiographical elements.

The Sentence is a story but is also a love letter from Erdrich to the literary world. She includes allusions to contemporary author peers, such as Lily King, and she advocates for bookstores as spaces of love, beauty, peace, and community engagement. The store’s employees have a spiritual connection with literature, creating a bond between them and the world of words. Erdrich highlights the importance of bookstore customers and features a loyal but flawed customer, Flora, as an intrinsic part of the bookstore’s skeleton. Flora’s ghost haunts Birchbark Books, for an array of possible reasons. Birchbark Books was a happy place for Flora during her life, and her connection with literature surpasses the human experience and transcends into the spiritual realm, again highlighting the power of literature. The novel’s characters have a love affair with books, creating a metacognitive connection between the novel and those who read it.

Flora is a flawed character because of her hold on Tookie, which triggers Tookie’s guilty relationship with the dead and challenges her patience with white appropriation of Indigenous American culture and identity. In life, Flora insisted that she had a heritage with Indigenous American tribes. She was heavily involved in Minnesota’s Indigenous community, fostering reservation runaways, contributing charity to the community, and actively seeking out Indigenous literature. Tookie, however, doesn’t see Flora’s connection to Indigenous American culture as authentic and is annoyed that Flora tries to appropriate someone else’s culture for her own benefit. Thus, Flora’s ghost is an unwelcome intrusion into Tookie’s life. Furthermore, Flora’s ghost forces Tookie to wrestle with the afterlife and with the sanctity of the dead as she grapples with her past action of moving a dead body and contributing to the desecration of the dead. She wonders if she can see Flora’s ghost because that action ruptured something between Tookie and the dead. Ultimately, it’s difficult for Tookie not to resent Flora’s ghost because even in death, Flora acts entitled to Tookie’s sacred spaces.

The narrative implies that Flora died reading a certain sentence in an autobiographical book written by an Indigenous American woman in the 19th century. Erdrich doesn’t yet reveal what that sentence is, but she heightens the importance of literature by giving this book, The Sentence, the role of a living being. The book has a heart and soul. Tookie can’t destroy it, and even after she buries it, she feels its presence. Erdrich conveys the message that books are powerful enough to kill and to consume their own spirit, and she plays with the word “sentence” by implying that one sentence in the book is capable of imposing death. Erdrich thus points to the awesome power of words to build, destroy, challenge, and inspire.

The phrase “the sentence” recurs throughout these three chapters. In Chapter 1, Tookie looks up the word “sentence” in a dictionary, hoping to come to terms with the sentence she received from the judge in her case. The dictionary definition refers to the grammatical construct but is fitting to incarceration too in that it connotes a period of time marked by pauses, clauses, and connections. The meaning of sentence as incarceration again appears in the book The Sentence, which Ketari gives Tookie—the book Flora was reading when she died. This book refers to incarceration and a sentencing to whiteness, as if hinting that Flora must acknowledge hers. That Erdrich titles her novel The Sentence implies that whatever message the notebook conveyed to Flora that was so powerful it could live on past her death will be revealed within Erdrich’s novel as well.

Tookie’s life changes dramatically between Chapter 1 and Chapter 3. Pollux arrests her and later becomes her husband, providing Tookie with love, security, and home, which highlights the theme The Power of Love as Redemption. Tookie escapes her 60-year sentence and now lives a comfortable suburban life with a job she enjoys and people she likes. Flora’s ghost is a major external conflict, however, that leads Tookie to confront her remaining internal conflicts between her heritage and the nature of her past crime. Thus, although Tookie no longer has a prison sentence, she’s now sentenced to a bizarre and mysterious relationship with Flora’s ghost. Erdrich implies that Tookie alone must discover the truth behind Flora’s death and set her soul free, thus setting Tookie free.

Erdrich is a member of the Indigenous American tribe known as the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, and her literature centers on Indigenous experiences. In The Sentence, Erdrich reveals the resilience of the Indigenous American community and highlights the struggles that Indigenous people still face in contemporary America. Erdrich’s fictional and real-life bookstore honors and preserves Indigenous American literature and culture, so the setting is important to Tookie’s character development as an Indigenous person. Her experiences show that the history of Indigenous American oppression isn’t over. Tookie deals with customers, loyal ones like Flora and passersby, who ask her ignorant and offensive questions about Indigenous culture. The scene in which a white woman stops Asema and Tookie outside the store to tell them horrific stories about her white ancestors reveals the depth of American ignorance. The woman’s stories include the desecration of Indigenous American skeletons and the robbery of Indigenous people’s land—and her stories portray her white ancestors as kindly heroes to Indigenous Americans. The woman tells the stories with pride, not realizing how insensitive and offensive they are. Asema and Tookie are forced into a polite facade, having internalized years of docility toward white institutions and people. They often deal with people like this woman, but the dehumanization of their individuality and shared history never gets easier. In this scene, which illustrates the theme The Resilience and Importance of Indigenous American Identity, Erdrich demonstrates the strength of the Indigenous American spirit against centuries of oppression. In addition, Erdrich urges white people to be more empathetic and more aware of how they speak to and think about Indigenous history and culture.

Additionally, this section of the novel uses seasons and weather to symbolize Tookie’s internal and external conflicts. The autumn months in Minnesota are typically cold, but in these chapters, an unusual warmth lingers in the air. Unseasonably warm weather implies that something is “off” with nature, and some people refer to this as an “Indian summer” (a term Erdrich doesn’t use—and is ironic given Indigenous Americans’ emphasis on harmony with nature). Literarily speaking, when months should be cold but are warm, the author is symbolizing a rupture of normal setting and climate. The snow finally arrives when Tookie needs it the most. Snow is often a literary symbol for peace because it forces the world to stop. Nature takes a break from breathing, and people are forced indoors to deal with their internal voices. Winter can convey a depressing, cold, and dark tone, but snow usually connotes some hope. It offers the opportunity to take a break from the world, to hibernate, to rest and be reborn. Eventually, snow thaws, and the new season of spring brings renewal. For Tookie, the snow is a relief because it creates a physical boundary between her and the book she buried. However, Erdrich foreshadows that this relief must be temporary, because eventually the snow will melt and Tookie will have to face the book again.