The Red Convertible Short Story Analysis Essay

While they were on the road where Lyman said could have been anywhere, they encounter a girl named Susy who needed a ride to her home in Alaska. Once they got there, Henry and Lyman were welcomed with opened arms. "We got up there and never wanted to leave... Her family really took to us. They fed us and put us up" (Erdrich 2). Henry seemed to be liked in all the interactions he has with other people. His social skills were great, and he acted no different from other normal people, so he had no reasons to be considered an outsider. His personality was playful and careless, as evident from all the driving around without knowing where they were going. Henry plays around with Susy and seemed to have formed a good relationship with her very quickly. She even seemed bummed out when Henry and Lyman had to leave. Susy states "I told her it was time for us to go. She stood up on a chair. 'You never seen my hair'" (Erdrich 3). Henry was a very easy guy to get along with we don't

The car was in good shape before Henry went off and joined the Marines but Lyman wanted it in perfect condition for when his brother arrived at home. The red convertible to Lyman is everything that he wants his relationship with his brother to be once he returns. Lyman wants everything to go back to the way things were like the summer before Henry left. When Henry finally does arrive at home, however, Lyman describes him as being "very different" and "jumpy and mean"(367). Henry no longer seems to have any interest in the car or in Lyman any longer. In desperation, to retrieve his old brother, Lyman goes out one night when Henry had gone out and "did a number" on the red convertible(367). This desperate act of Lyman is in order to try to bring the brothers together. Lyman feels that since they were connected through the red convertible in the past that it would bring them together now. When Henry sees the car messed up he becomes upset and instead of bringing the brothers together Henry becomes fanatically obsessed with fixing the red convertible. This event in the story shows how the war has changed their relationship from close knit to distant. However, once Henry gets the car fixed up he asks Lyman to go for a drive once again showing how the car and their relationship are hand in hand. The red convertible continues to bring the brothers together even in the worst of times.

In the end, the brothers appear to have a dispute over the car because Henry again wants Lyman to have it. Henry tells Lyman to take good care of it. Henry then walks into the river and drowns. Lyman unsuccessfully attempts to rescue Henry. He lets the car go into the river to be with his brother.

From this point on, Henry did not even look at the car that he and Lyman owned together. Obviously, they did not travel anymore or went anywhere together as before. This bothered Lyman, and attempting to bring him back to his own self, Lyman destroys the car and waits for Henry to find it. When Henry finds it, he begins fixing it, and as months passed by, he begins to act a little different. He was not as jumpy and disturbed as he was when he returned from the war. He finishes with the car, leaving it almost as good as it was before. He invites Lyman to go on a ride as they used to do before. They arrived at the river and begin drinking beer and laughing together. All of a sudden, Henry says, “got to cool me off” and troughs himself in the river, and let the current take him. Before he was gone he said, “My boots are filling”. He probably meant that he was tired of living, waiting for his dreams and hopes to be fulfilled and being stuck in two different cultures. After Henry says this, he finally disappears, separating what was once a relationship between two brothers.

“The Red Convertible” is a story of Henry, the American Indian man, about how he was suffering from the experiences at the Vietnam War. The story begins when he and his brother purchased a red convertible car. This story indicates that how cultural ties and the brother’s precious memories helped recover Henry. Actually it is more about the importance of family. By

The relationship of brothers usually lasts forever, but in Louise Erdrich’s short story “The Red Convertible”, the relationship of the main characters Lyman and Henry takes a turn. Erdrich takes her audience through the experiences these brothers face and how they must come to terms that their relationship has changed. Knowing that it will most likely never be the same both Lyman and Henry try to fix their relationship until eventually one falls because of the experiences he faced in life. While Lyman may think the red convertible will save his and Henry’s relationship, Erdrich makes it clear that it will not through the characterization of the brothers, the plot of the story, and the symbolism she uses to tell her story.

Henry returns from the war damaged not unlike the car after Lyman tries to destroy it. The relation ship between the brothers will never return to its previous state just as the car will never be the same. The car now comes to signify the change in the brother’s relationship. When Henry drowns himself in the river, Lyman lets the car go with them. Henry knows life will never be the same and neither will his feelings about the car. The car will now only trigger the raw emotions of his brother’s transformation and his death, instead of the carefree life he once had with a close brother. The car comes to symbolize death and the death of the close relationship between the to brothers. When Lyman lets go of the car, he is also letting go of his innocence.

There was no actual evident mention of their American part of lifestyle until this point of their life, dealing with Henry after war. In the end, the reader can see that red convertible is a bigger representation of Henry and his individual changes after the Vietnam than anything else. It is his changes that affect his whole family and thus his strong relationship with his brother and thus why the car also counterparts their brotherly relationship. Further as the red convertible re-introduces itself throughout the story, it is the first and foremost object that shows the lifestyle of Henry and Lyman as Chippewa and American members of society.

Towards the middle of the story we see how Lyman damages the car and this is to regain his brothers interest in the car. He wants his brother back and by having Henry fix the car it would be as if he were fixing the bond between the two. Lyman describes how he “did a number on its underside. Whacked it up… and waited for Henry to find it”(891). He wanted to“bring the old Henry back” (891), and what better way to do this than to have Henry focus on the one thing both brothers enjoyed which was the convertible. He thought that the car would make Henry return back to his old

Henry’s feeling about the Red Convertible was another change that he underwent before and after war. When he and Lyman

Both Erdrich’s, “The Red Convertible”, and O'Brien's, “The Things They Carried” reflect the effects of psychological trauma left by war; specifically, the Vietnam War. In Erdrich’s piece, she uses the red convertible as a metaphor for Henry. The fact that the two brothers purchased the convertible together is a serves to symbolize their bond. Yet, when Henry returns from his tenure as a soldier, his mental health has deteriorated into an apparently depressive state. I believe that Lyman’s act of wrecking the car represents how the war has devastated Henry’s emotional state. In Henry’s attempt to restore the car, he is indirectly trying to mend himself. Indeed we see that in his effort to do so, he exhibits signs indicative of his previous

In Karen’s ‘The Red Convertible,’ the story is narrated by Lyman Lamartine who is the younger brother of Henry Junior who had just got back from Vietnam after the war was over. The whole story is narrated in a flashback unlike Tim’s ‘The Things They Carried’ where the story moves back and forth in time. For example when the author describes the things that the soldiers carried in the very beginning of the story, he mentions Ted Lavender carrying six or seven ounces of premium dope until he was shot. Karen emphasizes more on the relationship between brothers and compares the state of mind in which they were before and after the war. The younger brother Lyman hadn’t changed much where as the elder brother Henry was completely a different person after he got back from Vietnam.

Other stories, perceived as unrealistic, often are posited so because they contain elements we do not see in the real world; metaphoric fantasy, symbolism, abstractness. These concepts are all based on our own filters of perception – we discern what is historically accurate and what is legend, or myth, based on our position in culture and the lenses which we view ourselves. In “The Red Convertible”, we can see these concepts at play – Lyman, narrating the story of the relationship with his brother Henry, tells a story that flows very effortlessly. Things that happen around him seem to brush off of him, as if they are no big deal.

Sunday after church, James tossed the car key to Henry and told him to drive Mother and me home. Henry’s eyes beamed. He’d been able to drive for a while, but Daddy had never let him use the car, and James had done all the driving since Daddy passed. Henry had complained often, but James would shake his head and tell him he wasn’t ready. I wondered what had suddenly changed.

Before the war, Lyman and his brother Henry were extremely close. Before Henry departed for the war, and as Lyman recounts in the story, the two bonded over a red convertible. This car proves to be symbolic, both throughout, and at the end of the story, due to the change in Henry’s behavior, illustrated by this quote from when Henry returns: “We had always been together before. But he was such a loner now that I didn’t know how to take it.”