Night of the Living Rez

“The Name Means Thunder” is the only story in the collection about David but explicitly narrated by Dee. This retrospective approach to the narration allows Talty to offer Dee’s perspective on David’s life, while also breaking from David’s story to fill in information about what has happened in the intervening years. Frick, for example, is an active part of David’s plotline, but Dee also jumps ahead to narrate what happened in the wake of Frick’s death years later. This layering of the narrative collapses the past and present, bringing Dee’s current emotional state to bear on the events of the past. This narrative structure reveals how Personal and Communal History are intertwined with the act of storytelling, as Dee’s experiences impact the way he remembers and tells these stories.

Bedogi is a heavily symbolic character, and his fate at the end of the story reflects on many of the collection’s core themes. Bedogi is the collection’s only character to be called by a name in the Penobscot language. This naming choice associates Bedogi with an attempt to connect with, and perhaps return to, a cultural heritage that is imperiled by generations of trauma and erasure. Bedogi himself, though, isn’t free of Entrapment in Cycles of Trauma: He is born addicted to methadone because of Paige’s addiction, and the actual cause of his death is unclear because of the unreliability of Dee’s narration. Bedogi’s arc represents an inability common to all the characters in the story, despite their efforts, to escape the cycles of trauma; his death is only the site of another trauma so impactful that it leaves David blinded (both literally and metaphorically) to the point that he can no longer properly recall the events of the past.