Most critics misread Robert Kroetsch's theoretical statement "The Fear of Women in Prairie Fiction: An Erotics of Space" as being prescriptive of Kroetsch's conception of male-female relationships rather than descriptive of relationships in previous prairie fiction. Similarly, critical views of Gone Indian perpetuate the repressive binarism the characters in the novel seek to escape. Kroetsch's novel portrays the struggle to escape the definition of identity in the restrictive binary form (East-West, male-female, stasis-flux, reason-intuition); Kroetsch's protagonist finds a way to define identity without resorting to binarism, or evades defining it at all. The book remains an open field, a wealth of possibilities offering a series of metamorphoses, rather than a single switch from one pole to its opposite.
