This creates confusion: things are becoming their opposite, contrary categories are switching places, distinctions are becoming blurred. The door being made into a table is an example of this. Which is it really -- a table or a door? That depends on how you look at it and what you use it for. Meaning is contingent, not inherent.
Another instance of uncertainty is when the captured Comanche becomes Gustav Aschenbach, the Thomas Mann character. Death in Venice is similar to this story in that they are both about frustrated passion and impossible love.
The narrator of "The Indian Uprising" tries to forget about torturing the captured Comanche by escaping into drunkenness and love, but it doesn't work, he can't blot out the cruelty. Since he can't escape from it, he tries to reduce it to images, associations, tropes -- anything rather than having to face the human reality. Maybe reality doesn't even exist, he's beginning to think.
These incidents and many others in the story raise the theme of skepticism, of being unable to know the truth about anything. Barthelme, like most postmoderns, was a skeptic and agnostic. He felt we can know very little about the world but somehow we have to keep trying to figure it out.
Although the narrator attempts to withdraw into his personal life of art and romance, he is finally captured. Miss R., who is on the side of the Indians, tells him to strip naked, and he stares into the eyes of his captors, about to receive their judgment. His last words in the story are another fashion inventory: "paint, feathers, beads," all things both women and Indians wear. The implication may be that feminists are part of the same revolutionary force as guerrillas.
After this, we don't know what happens. Maybe one of the women takes her revenge for "the white, raised scars" he put on her back. Maybe the Indians take revenge for the torture. But maybe they are benevolent conquerors and send him to a reeducation camp. We can't be sure.
And that's an appropriate ending for the story, considering that one of its themes is the difficulty of knowing anything. This doubt of all systems of knowledge, this negative epistemology, is the prime characteristic of the postmodern.
This sense of unknowing contributes to the narrator's anxiety about relationships. He views these as being based only in the physical world, which is always changing. He says, "You can never touch a girl in the same way more than once, twice, or another number of times however much you may wish to hold, wrap, or otherwise fix her hand, or look, or some other quality, or incident, known to you previously." He is anxious, then, because he can't hold onto the sensation of his lover's touch, can't fix her in his perceptions. Their happy moments together are fleeting. Nothing lasts.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
