The Sentence

The innocent baby Jarvis represents Tookie’s possibility for redemption. His surprising introduction to the narrative is a plot twist that reinvigorates her and puts much of her life in perspective. Jarvis’s innocence is a blank slate on which Tookie can express and project the deepest, warmest parts of her character. She still deals with the ramifications of her crime and has internalized her flaws. Although her current life is already marked by love, Jarvis’s presence is a reminder that she can have a new start. Jarvis’s innocence prevents him from judgment, and his baby eyes recognize only Tookie’s kindness. He poses a foil to Hetta, who is caught up in her own projections and resentments against Tookie. Hetta and Tookie have a fragile, fraught relationship. Tookie inadvertently sets Hetta off, and Hetta criticizes Tookie or ignores her completely. Jarvis is Tookie’s opportunity, perhaps her first chance, at redeeming the qualities she sees in herself that trigger other people, like Hetta. Tookie thinks that Flora singled her out to haunt for a reason, another abrasion on Tookie’s character. However, Jarvis does nothing but respond to the pure love that she has in abundance, which highlights the novel’s theme The Power of Love as Redemption.

Tookie’s internal conflicts, her internalization of past wrongs and judgments, haunt her, paralleling the haunting from Flora’s ghost. In this section of the novel, both hauntings escalate. Tookie starts remembering moments from her incarceration that she previously tried to leave in the past. She hears Flora’s ghost asking Tookie to let her in and even feels the touch of Flora’s ghostly hand. When Tookie starts talking about Flora’s ghost with the other employees, like her former teacher Jackie, there’s some doubt about Tookie’s story, though it isn’t directly addressed. Erdrich leaves it ambiguous whether Tookie is only imagining Flora’s ghost as a projection of Tookie’s internal conflicts. Flora’s ghost may be real—or a physical manifestation of the past that continues to haunt Tookie. The ghost’s behavior escalates as Tookie’s anxiety increases with the cold of winter, the stress of Hetta’s homecoming, the worldwide pandemic, and Tookie’s difficult past. Her sense of foreboding suggests that she fears her happy life may be challenged.

However, Pen’s witnessing the ghost helps affirm that it’s a real spirit and not a projection of her own fears. Pen sees or feels many of the same things Tookie does, but Erdrich doesn’t clarify whether Pen’s ghost is the same as Tookie’s. Because Pen is also under stress, she’s more prone to believe in a ghost than other bookstore employees are. Regardless of how or why Pen and Tookie experience supernational contact, this section of the novel casts Pen as Tookie’s ally against those forces as well as Tookie’s own inner conflicts.

Another powerful ally to Tookie is Jackie, who was once Tookie’s schoolteacher and reached out to her with books to read while she was incarcerated. Jackie helped Tookie get the job at Birchbark Books and years later remains a steadfast friend and mentor to her. Tookie reaches out to Jackie whenever she needs advice, and Jackie’s straightforward guidance keeps Tookie realistic and grounded amid her monumental stressors. Jackie’s character represents the support system that is sorely missing from communities at large. Jackie’s empathy toward Tookie is based on her relationship with her students and her commitment to the power of literature. Jackie is Tookie’s hero and an important secondary character who keeps Tookie motivated and loved.

Jackie, Pen, and the other Birchbark Books employees play a central role as world events bring them closer together. As they celebrate New Year’s together, their debate about the qualities of various types of wild rice connects to the novel’s theme The Resilience and Importance of Indigenous American Identity. Wild rice symbolizes their shared cultural heritage, as it’s a staple of the Indigenous American diet, rural culture, and history. Erdrich uses this conversation about rice as another example of the denigration of Indigenous identity at the hands of white American society. Recent infrastructures built by majority-white state governments have interfered in the cultivation of wild rice, exemplifying how the government oppresses and destroys Indigenous American culture.

As the COVID-19 pandemic grows, Birchbark Books’ employees come together even though the virus keeps them physically apart. The stresses of keeping the bookstore operating during a lengthy and mysterious quarantine invigorates their roles as essential people in society but also forces them to lean on one another more than ever. For example, Tookie is so perturbed by her isolation with Flora’s ghost during her solo shifts in the bookstore that Jackie arranges for Tookie to always have a work buddy, emphasizing the importance of community and support—and escalating the drama by contrasting with the fear and isolation of the pandemic. Bookstores were declared essential businesses during the pandemic, providing both an economic and moral victory to booksellers and book lovers. Granted essential worker status, Birchbark Books stays open, and its employees continue to collect pay, demonstrating the cultural importance of books as a form of escapism and community. In addition, this is a rare example of the government saving Tookie’s community instead of desecrating and destroying it.

Foregrounding the novel’s theme The Unpredictability of Life, the pandemic is a global event that connects everybody through fear, unknowability, and a yearning for community. As the pandemic worsens, Flora’s ghost fills Tookie with foreboding, a feeling she refers to as “divination.” Divination involves seeking knowledge of the future, but the shock of the pandemic shows that foreboding doesn’t provide revelation and underscores life’s unpredictability. Flora’s ghost becomes a symbol of the divination of the pandemic. Flora is technically free of suffering through the pandemic, but now everyone in the world is in a situation similar to that of Flora’s ghost, yearning for a past they can’t get back. Thus, Flora’s ghost is, in narrative hindsight, a warning to Tookie and others that life is full of uncertainty and liable to be challenged on a random basis.

In this section of the novel, Erdrich uses several symbols in to increase tension and mystery. Cowbirds represent Tookie’s perception of an onslaught of unwelcome and invasive presences. Along with Flora’s ghost, Birchbark Books is haunted by the self-published books of writers who sneak them onto the shelves, depositing their dreams and their work but interfering with the store’s systems, like the cowbird, which lays its eggs in the nests of other species. Tookie collects “cowbird” books and takes them home with her, demonstrating that Tookie’s empathy extends to objects and projections of other people that don’t have a home. Laurent’s cowbird book presents a possible solution to determining the identity of Hetta’s baby’s father. That Tookie knows almost instinctively that the same odd young man who planted his bizarre and illegible book on the shelves is Jarvis’s father demonstrates her divination—her ability to see patterns or clues revealing seeds of truth about people that many other characters ignore.

In addition, several forms of isolation are symbolic in this section. Tookie imposes self-isolation in dealing with internal conflict without Pollux’s help. Her past crime and incarceration, Flora’s ghost, and the mysterious buried book The Sentence eat away at Tookie’s psyche, but she isolates and compartmentalizes her problems. The pandemic breeds literal isolation by forcing people to stay in their homes, away from loved ones and from the world around them. Tookie, alone with Flora’s ghost, experiences literal isolation, which puts Tookie on edge and fills her with resentment. In addition, Erdrich comments on a larger social isolation: that of the Indigenous American community in defense against centuries of oppression. The problem with isolation, in all these examples, is that it escalates tension.

Another symbol in this section is the song “Ain’t No Grave” by Johnny Cash. The song is about a soul who refuses to be taken away. No grave or calling of the angels can hold the narrator’s body down in this song. It’s a fitting song to describe Flora’s ghost. In the song, Cash sings about a trumpet calling him forward, implying that Tookie must figure out what Flora’s ghost’s trumpet entails.

Erdrich creates symbolic parallels between her characters to represent the depths or limitations of their relationships with one another. An example is Hetta’s role in a pornographic film. One of Pollux’s favorite stories is meeting Kim Bassinger as she prepped for the mainstream film Midnight Cowgirl. Although Pollux doesn’t know it, his niece—who is like a daughter to him—participated in a pornographic film with the same name. This parallel reveals the troubled nature of Hetta’s relationship with her family and symbolizes the coincidental secrets people keep from their loved ones.

The section ends with the heralding of spring. These chapters begin in winter, a symbol for isolation and the potential for rebirth. In literature, springtime often symbolizes rebirth, rejuvenation, and new revelations. Spring is usually a time of joy because the coldness of winter thaws, but it’s also a season marked by rain, growth, and change. With new birth comes the potential for healing but also the potential to reveal new challenges that were buried (as in the case of the book The Sentence, literally buried in the frozen-over ground) during the winter.