Louise Erdrich wrote The Plague of Doves through multiple perspectives so that her readers can get a fuller picture of the fictional town of Pluto, North Dakota. This idea of needing multiple viewpoints comes from her own experiences where life could be broken down into Native American as well as European-American aspects. Without being presented with numerous perspectives of Pluto, Erdrich believes that it is impossible to accurately understand the truth about Pluto. This relates to Linda Hutcheon's analysis of postmodernism and "the eighteenth-century concern for lies and falsity [became] a postmodern concern for the multiplicity and dispersion of truth(s), truth(s) relative in the specificity of place and culture" (Hutcheon 108). Essentially, Hutcheon is saying that history is comprised of multiple partial truths, or perspectives, which only collectively form the full, real truth. John Duvall furthers this point when he wrote that "a number of narratives turns one's attention away from the aesthetic past (such as literary history) and toward a more broadly conceived sense of history as textually mediated and constructed." All in all, Jens-Erik Mai sums this up best in A Postmodern Theory of Knowledge Organization, by stating that "the idea of objectivity and neutrality fall with the rise of the postmodern thought." By this, he means that it is impossible for one person to tell the complete objective truth about something as broad as this history of a town when there is only a finite amount of knowledge. There will always be details missing and perspectives that remain unaccounted for. By providing more narrators, the reader can get a better idea of the holistic and complete truth, but until then, each perspective can only be called a partial truth.
Picture
http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/2263/portal1or3at5.jpg
Louise Erdrich's The Plague of Doves uses multiple perspectives in a very similar way to how the video game Portal allows its players to see things from new angles. While Erdrich uses different characters' viewpoints to construct her plot, Portal gives its users the ability to create portals physically and visually linking two different locations on a level. While the setting remains the same throughout each level of Portal, the portals provide new perspectives and add partial truths, just like how Erdrich's characters all tell the same history through the use of different events and details. Only through these multiple perspectives is the reader (or player) ever fully aware of the Truth.