The Affect in Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves

The present study addresses Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves in the light of Patrick Colm Hogan’s affect notions of narrative concerning the emotional experiences of the subjects. This paper attempts to trace the concepts of affect, emotional narrative, attachment relations, emotional geography and emotional history in Erdrich’s novel in order to explore how emotions and relations are interrelated in the narrative of geography, history, and, particularly, in what affects the narrative and the subjects in fiction. The present paper, specifically, demonstrates how Erdrich’s mentioned novel acts as the affect study and narrative of emotion that vocalizes the history and geography of Native American people of the Ojibwa which have not been divulged due to social and ontological factors. The study thus investigates the ontological and epistemological paradigms in Native American life and history experienced by Ojibwa survivors. In addition, it argues how emotionology works for the minority subjects and how the notion of affect in terms of Hogan’s theory is traceable in Erdrich’s novel. In The Plague of Doves, the affected survivors are haunted with the emotional memory of their present as a consequence of which the subjects continuously shift from the present time to the past – whereby time loses its linearity in the narrative.