The Plague Of Doves

Stamps and letters appear throughout the novel, both in the stamp-collecting passions of Evelina’s paternal line and the letter-mailing of Seraph and various other characters. Letters themselves represent a way for characters to connect to one another, not just through the actual communication of emotions and stories between two characters, but also in their tangible capacity as remnants of the past. That is, letters can be read by future generations, effectively connecting deceased characters to their living kin via the relay of stories. The stamps that mark these letters, some of which are collected and lusted after by the book’s various ancillary stamp-collecting characters, also represent familial future as they can be passed from one generation to the next. The importance placed on stamps then reiterates the importance of intergenerational communication via the continued tradition of passing on the stories of the past.

Ultimately, the unraveling of the murder mystery itself concludes with a letter. Cordelia admits to finding a love letter from Tobek in her sister’s belongings, which makes her believe that he could never be the murderer. “The valentine has always told me that the boy’s name should not have been scratched from the war memorial. Not only were innocent people hanged, unbearably murdered for nobody’s justice, but even that boy was not the killer after all” (308). Cordelia finds truth in this letter, a truth that most other people around her do not know. Most of the town and the surrounding area believes Tobek to have been the murderer, and therefore blames Tobek for the deaths of Holy Track and the others. However, Cordelia knows this to be untrue. In this way, letters possess the unique quality of unveiling the truth, or at the very least, a kind of truth given truth’s apparent relativity within the novel. Stories that letters tell possess the capacity to answer seemingly unanswerable questions, or, at the very least, allow Cordelia to look in another direction when attempting to ascertain the identity of her family’s murderer. 

Boundaries are very important to the geographic location of the novel, especially considering the boundaries between the reservation and the surrounding, dying towns. In this way, the author constructs geographic boundaries between the living and the dead. However, the interconnectivity of the characters’ histories often obfuscate this boundary, as the dead’s actions have consequences for those who remain alive. Similarly, the author overthrows the notions of physical boundaries within the novel, demonstrating characters’ abilities to slip between man-made delineations. When Shamengwa waits for his violin, he reflects on the nature of boundaries, “I began to understand why people said of the lake there is no end to it, when of course, as I always thought, it was bounded by rocks. But there were rivers flowing in and flowing out, secret currents, six kinds of weather working on its surface and a hidden terrain underneath. Each wave washed in from somewhere unseen and washed right out again to go somewhere unknown” (205-206). As a human being, Shamengwa believes he can place delineations upon nature by marking its boundaries. However, once he comes face-to-face with the sheer vastness of nature, he finds any attempts at man-made boundaries to be futile. In this way, interconnectivity supersedes man’s attempt to categorize various aspects of society and nature, as no such designations exist within nature. Therefore, the importance the author places on the ability to slip between boundaries reflects the interconnectivity evident within the environment.