HAUNTED REALITIES: IMAGINATION, IMAGE, AND THE INTERPLAY OF FANTASY AND REALITY IN LOUISE ERDRICH’S 'THE SENTENCE'
HAUNTED REALITIES: IMAGINATION, IMAGE, AND THE INTERPLAY OF FANTASY AND REALITY IN LOUISE ERDRICH’S 'THE SENTENCE'

Summary/Abstract: Louise Erdrich’s 'The Sentence' engages with the aesthetics of magical realism and postmodern metafiction in order to explore the boundaries we meet between fantasy and reality. Set during the COVID-19 pandemic and the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, the novel offers the readers a haunted Minneapolis bookstore, which appears to be a liminal space having the material and the spectral coexist. This paper intends to focus on the way Louise Erdrich employs imagination and image not as escapist devices, but as epistemological tools that reveal hidden moral and emotional truths. There is an interplay of the mundane and the supernatural in the novel that exposes the way in which fantasy can reframe historical trauma and ethical responsibility. Theories of the fantastic and narrative self-reflexivity help reveal the manner in which the author transforms the act of storytelling into an imaginative negotiation between lived experience and literary invention where everything is a construct open to reimagination.

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