Night of the Living Rez

Morgan TaltyFiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2022

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Symbols & Motifs

Drug Use

Drugs are one of the collection’s most present and complex symbols. Nearly every major character struggles with a form of addiction, be it to alcohol, nicotine, or the controlled substances Dee and Fellis spend much of their time seeking. Drugs are an integral and quotidian part of Dee’s life; in “Get Me Some Medicine” he even sips his methadone “slow like coffee” (49). The prevalence of drugs, their usage, and the various characters’ attempt to rid themselves of them, are powerful symbols of cyclical trauma in the collection. Paige, for instance, uses methadone to treat her narcotic addiction; this creates a methadone dependency in her child in “The Names Means Thunder.” The drug becomes a literal and figurative representation of the inheritance of trauma and the snowballing effect that one inherited trauma can have on an individual, and on a generation.

Drugs, though, are not only an embodiment of inherited trauma. The titular “blessing tobacco” references David’s grandmother’s family’s store of sacred tobacco that, according to the grandmother, her little brother used to try to steal. In this story, the tobacco is connected to familial history and Penobscot tradition; it is sacred, and David’s great-uncle was punished for his disrespectful treatment of it. This representation of drug use contrasts starkly with the present-day drug use in Dee’s community. Tobacco is both a connection to a Penobscot culture that is no longer accessible to Dee’s generation and a reminder of the ways in which that culture has been irrevocably altered by settler colonialism.

Intrusions of the Natural World

Dee and Fellis spend a great deal of time outdoors, but the natural world is rarely a source of comfort for the characters in Night of the Living Rez. Animals instead act as disruptive entities, appearing in places where they don’t belong and irritating or even harming the characters they interact with. The turtle in “Food for the Common Cold,” for instance, dies unceremoniously in David’s mother’s closet, offering a grotesque mirroring of the dead children haunting both Frick and David’s mother. The stench of the dead turtle is an external source of tension for Frick and David’s mother, and this is part of what drives them into conflict in the story. The caterpillars in “In a Field of Stray Caterpillars” are a similarly gruesome plot device. The caterpillar is typically a symbol of growth and maturation, but here the caterpillars exist only to be killed on the road, releasing a stench that causes Dee and Fellis to vomit. Nature is an antagonist in these stories, pushing characters to moments of change.

The pugwagee in the story “Night of the Living Rez,” while not precisely an animal, is another extension of the natural world with a disruptive presence. When the boys search for the pugwagee in the forest, they view it as a source of fear. When they discover that the animalistic pugwagee is actually Paige, crawling through the forest while high, this highlights for David how dire his sister’s situation is. The natural world throughout these stories is a source of distress that intrudes on these characters’ lives to instigate them to action.

Outer Space

David repeatedly returns to images of outer space through the collection, often as a way of conceptualizing or provoking anxieties in his daily life. In “The Blessing Tobacco,” David watches a documentary about Pioneer 10, a space probe that has sent its final signal and is being abandoned by NASA. This concept of absolute abandonment and isolation terrifies David; he wishes that “the near impossible would happen: that a passing space rock would collide with it, shatter it to pieces, and send it broken toward the stars” (117). For the young David, any contact at all—even contact that is ultimately destructive—is preferable to the probe’s silent isolation. This imagery prefigures David/Dee’s self-destructive tendencies in “Safe Harbor.”

The space imagery returns in “The Name Means Thunder” when David learns about the inevitable nova of the sun. He interrogates his mother about whether it will really happen, and despite her efforts to calm him, David takes to studying the sun with his naked eyes. David once again engages in a self-harming activity to try to alleviate his anxiety. In these stories, outer space becomes a canvas onto which David can project his anxieties about loss and abandonment because he has no healthy outlets for these fears in his daily life.