Storyteller

As I progressed through my first read of Leslie Marmon Silko's "Storyteller," I was a little confused as to where the story was actually headed. It seemed like quite the jumbled narrative because of how much jumping around there was between the different settings, plots, and characters. Silko goes between the boarding school, the house where the old man lives, the store, the jail, along with a couple other settings that really made it seem like this story contained several different plots. As i neared the end, I expected the old man's story to somehow coincide with that of the girl, our main character, who was running from the storeman. Those two aspects of the story never really seemed to come together, but rather after the storeman fell through the ice, died, and the girl admitted to "murdering" him, that section of this full narrative actually came to a finite end. However, the old man's story of the bear hunting the man ended as more or less of a cliffhanger after the man dropped the knife and the bear looked his way. It's almost as if the reader is kind of supposed to know what happens next, as I imagined that was the man's last few moments before the bear makes him a meal. All the different stories within the story and plots within plots made it all seem kind of unorganized to me, but after doing some research about Leslie Marmon Silko, I found out why the story was written this way.

Silko and most of her stories come from a Native American community called Laguna Pueblo, which, from what I understand, is somewhere in the New Mexico/Arizona region. Storytelling in this particular Native American culture is much different from that of our Anglo-style of storytelling. While the traditional western style of storytelling is often associated with individual authorship and linear stories that are written by one and meant to be read by many, the storytelling style of the Pueblo people involves many different contributors and a lot of their stories are simply oral tradition. A big part of their oral tradition is that a story can only develop through several different accounts of it because each new person to tell the story brings something new to the narrative.

So after seeing all of that, I came to the conclusion that "Storyteller" was not meant to be a straightforward narrative, but rather a story about the essence of the storytelling style of Silko's fellow people. The reason that the story seems so chaotic in the way of organization is because it's exemplifying the many different ways a story can be told. I'm not sold on the fact that all of the different sections of the story are different takes on the same narrative, but I can see how someone could take that stance. All in all it was quite confusing upon the first read, but a little research on the author kind of brought it back around for me to where I can at least grasp what Silko was setting out to do.