Joe sums this up towards the end of the novel by reminiscing: “…pulling trees that day, just months ago, I was in heaven.
To his young mind, it was the only way he could right all that had become wrong in his universe. It is the feeling that his world has been totally and irreparably distorted world that ultimately causes him to feel as though he has no choice but to kill Landon Lark. Due to this more limited scope, readers can more fully see the just how devastating the crime against Geraldine was to Joe and the space he occupies. As young people, the world is usually a fairly small place, and to beginning-of-the-novel Joe, the reservation and his family encompass his entire world. Because of their age and social limitations, the scope of a young adult’s world will almost always be narrower than that of an adult.
There are some unique traits of a young adult mind that can make communicating certain themes much more effective and powerful. Joe’s positionality as a young, indigenous male gives him a distinctive and useful view of his world, and Erdrich uses these traits both to draw readers into the world of the text as well as to further several key themes such as the pervasive nature of violence, the complexity of Indian law, and the importance of confronting those two issues. Although there are some practical reasons to choose a male protagonist over a female one (namely, that a book with a female protagonist risks being branded a “girl book” – which is a different problem for a different essay), Erdrich’s choice of Joe as the individual who guides us through the story seems like a very conscious one.
Because the center of the drama is in actuality focused on Joe’s mother (Geraldine) and the author herself is a woman, it is natural to wonder why she might have made such a choice of narrator. In her novel The Round House, Louise Erdrich makes the interesting choice of taking on serious issues of violence against women through the perspective of a 13-year-old boy-Joe.
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