Point of View

Throughout Shadow Tag, Erdrich oscillates between the first and third-person perspectives in order to emphasize and reinforce Irene’s personal experience of her marriage. Erdrich opens the novel in the first-person perspective, as Irene lays out one of the central dramatic tensions of the narrative: “I have two diaries now” (3). Over the course of the novel, Erdrich alternates between the first-person viewpoint of Irene’s diaries and a more objective, external third-person narration. In this way, she presents the reader with both action and response. After Irene learns that she has a previously unknown half-sister, she writes in her journal, “I have suddenly got someone else. A sister… Someone Gil doesn’t know about” (72). Here, Erdrich prioritizes Irene’s emotional experience of the novel’s events. She aligns the reader not with Gil’s perspective of the marriage, but with that of his wife. In...