Multivocality, Identity and Tradition in Michael Dorris’s A Yellow Raft in Blue Water

Abstract

This article explores Michael Dorris’s 1987 novel Yellow Raft in Blue Water. Although Michael Dorris is currently viewed as a persona non grata by the American academia, Yellow Raft in Blue Water, probably his masterpiece, is still worthy of analysis both as a text per se and as a novel written by a self-identified Native American attempting to write from within Native American experience. The novel consists of three deeply intertwined narratives about the lives of three consecutive generations of Native American women. Issues of identity in a bi-cultural (and even multi-cultural) setting as well as the clash between tradition and contemporaneous life as they are depicted in the novel is addressed, and the narrative character of the work is discussed using Gordon E. Slethaug’s insightful concept of multivocal narrative.