40 pages • 1 hour read
N. Scott MomadayThe Way to Rainy Mountain
Nonfiction | Anthology/Varied Collection | Adult | Published in 1969A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Juxtaposition
Juxtaposition is the technique of placing two (or in this case, three) disparate items side by side in the hope of generating new insights about each. Momaday’s unique, collage-like structure within the stories often avoids explicit connections or transitions and instead relies on the reader to make connections between the ancestral voice, the historical voice, and his personal reflections, making juxtaposition one of his central literary devices in this text.
For example, Story XVI juxtaposes three images of buffalo: the mighty, steel-horned monster that menaces the hunter in the ancestral voice’s story; the sad, old, tame buffalo killed by two old Kiowa men in a mock buffalo hunt in Carnegie, Oklahoma in the early 20th century, and the mother buffalo that chases Momaday and his father in Medicine Park and sets their hearts pounding. These three stories, though lacking explicit transitions or comparisons between them, invite those comparisons nonetheless. As Momaday and his father feel their “hearts beating fast,” they are sharing in some part of the experience of the hunter chased into the tree by the metal buffalo and, in a larger sense, experiencing a portion of the awe and terror that the Kiowa hunters must have known in their days on the plains (55). Set between these encounters, the aged hunters “mounted on work horses” seem as sadly diminished as the “poor broken beast” they are expected to kill for the townspeople’s amusement, and clearly mourning for this glorious past is part of the story’s point (55). Yet when “they r[un] that animal down and […] [kill] it with arrows,” they display the same skills as the hunter of legend who brought down the metal buffalo with an arrow aimed in the cloven place in his hoof (55).
Other juxtapositions are even less explicitly connected. Story IV presents the ancestral story of the woman who becomes the bride of the sun after being taken up to the sky by a swift-growing tree, placing that legend alongside geographical information about the Western mountains and a reminiscence about a mountain walk. Language connects the three voices: “The land itself ascends to the sky,” says the historical voice, referring to the mountains, while Momaday himself observes that the top branches of a lodgepole pine “seemed very slowly to ride across the blue sky” (23). The result is a more subtle meditation on the relationship between the physical landscape and the stories of the people who live in that landscape.
Polyvocality
Polyvocality describes a text that uses multiple narrators. The three categories of voices in The Way to Rainy Mountain are explicitly distinguished typographically, with the ancestral voice in large, double-spaced italics, the historical voice in upright font, perhaps implying authority, and Momaday’s reflections in italics that are inset from the margin, as with a block quotation—a humble subordination of this voice to the others. It is worth noting, however, that by giving the ancestral stories the first word and lived experience the final one, Momaday places the historical record in context and subjects it to questioning and critique by the other voices, rather than allowing it to stand as a sole authority.
Polyvocality in The Way to Rainy Mountain adds depth and richness to the text even beyond Momaday’s stated use of three voices, since the text includes stories from Al Momaday, history in voices including those of James Mooney and George Catlin, and personal memories narrated by Momaday. The Introduction, Story XXIII, and the Epilogue also add narratives from Aho and Ko-Sahn: a chorus of ancestors and witnesses.
There is significant cultural context for polyvocality in The Way to Rainy Mountain. The book discusses and adds its own entry to the Kiowas’ tradition of oral storytelling, a literary tradition in which stories are preserved but also influenced and changed by the voices of many different narrators as they are passed down through the generations.
One of the tales in which the voices are at their most contentious is Story XVII, which asserts, “Bad women are thrown away” (58). Momaday contrasts the ancestral voice’s callous treatment of the traitorous wife with his own sympathetic reading of the Kiowa calendars as “graphic proof that the lives of women were hard, whether they were ‘bad women’ or not” (59). His repetition of the ancestral story’s phrase, “bad women,” asks the readers to treat the concept critically. His personal reflection in the story provides yet another perspective on Kiowa women, one full of glowing admiration for his great-great-grandmother, Kau-au-ointy, who rose up out of slavery “to become a figure in the tribe” (59). Thus, Momaday as author preserves these old stories of women’s lives while explicitly choosing to not reproduce some of the old attitudes around them.
