Storyteller by Leslie Marmon Silko
"Storyteller" by Leslie Marmon Silko is a multifaceted work that combines autobiographical sketches, poetry, family photographs, and short stories to create a rich portrait of cultural identity and the complexities of heritage. The collection primarily explores the tensions between European American and Native American cultures, focusing on personal and communal narratives. The title story, "Storyteller," centers on a young Inuit woman living in Alaska as she navigates her conflicted feelings toward white civilization, represented by her interactions with an old man who serves as the storyteller.
As she reflects on her experiences, including her schooling and the contrasting lifestyles of her people and the white settlers—the "Gussucks"—she grapples with themes of exploitation and cultural disillusionment. The narrative unfolds alongside the old man’s tale of a hunter facing a bear, creating a parallel between their stories that underscores the struggles between generations and cultures. The Inuit woman's journey culminates in a moment of vengeance against the storekeeper responsible for her parents' demise, symbolizing both personal and collective resistance. Ultimately, the dual narratives highlight the precarious existence of Native Americans within a dominant culture that is both alluring and destructive, offering readers insight into the complexities of identity, sexuality, and survival in a colonized landscape.
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Subject Terms
Storyteller by Leslie Marmon Silko
First published: 1981
The Work
A collection of autobiographical sketches, poems, family photographs, and short stories, Storyteller fuses literary and extraliterary material into a mosaic portrait of cultural heritage and of conflict between the two ethnic groups composing her heritage, the European American and the Native American.
The title story, “Storyteller,” presents that conflict from the point of view of a young Inuit woman who is fascinated with and repulsed by white civilization. Set in Alaska—the only major work of the author not in a Southwestern setting—the story follows her thoughts and observations as she spends her days amid these contrasting cultures. The old man with whom she lives and who has used her sexually—“she knew what he wanted”—is the storyteller. Now bedridden with age and the cold, subsisting on dried fish, which he keeps under his pillow, the old man narrates a tale, carefully, insistently, about a hunter on the ice facing a challenge from a bear.
Between the beginning and end of his own tale, the Inuit woman’s story unfolds. She went to the government school, but largely out of curiosity, and although she remembers being whipped by one of the teachers, her fascination with whites—the “Gussucks,” as she calls them—only deepened when she observed their oil rigs, their large yellow machines, and their metal buildings. Gradually she learns that the Gussucks are not so much to be respected or feared but rather scorned because of their insensitivity and greed. The old man calls them thieves, and she herself laughs at the smug confidence they place in their machines, which are almost useless in the Alaskan cold.
Her physical curiosity about the Gussucks leads to her being sexually exploited by one of them, and the turning point of the story occurs when the Inuit woman learns that a Gussuck storekeeper was responsible for the death of her parents by giving them nonpotable alcohol in exchange for their rifles. In revenge, she lures the storekeeper onto the ice, where he falls through and drowns.
At the conclusion, the old man, now on his deathbed, finishes his tale of the hunter and the bear. The two stories, the old man’s and the Inuit woman’s, thus comment on each other. The woman’s vengeance bears a double victory, one the triumph of her people, the other a vindication of her sexuality over its abuses by whites. Yet the old man’s story ends menacingly for the hunter, suggesting that the Native American’s fate is—like the hunter—perilous amid the alien culture that both attracts and repels.
Bibliography
Booklist. LXXVII, July 15, 1981, p. 1431.
Graulich, Melody, ed. “Yellow Woman”: Leslie Marmon Silko. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Includes an excellent introduction by Graulich setting Storyteller in its cultural, biographical, and critical contexts. Also includes essays dealing with Storyteller by Linda Danielson, Patricia Jones, Bernard A. Hirsch, and Arnold Krupat.
Library Journal. CVI, May 1, 1981, p. 987.
Ms. X, July, 1981, p. 89.
The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVI, May 24, 1981, p. 72.
Saturday Review. VIII, May, 1981, p. 72.
Seyersted, Per. Leslie Marmon Silko. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1980. A good introduction to Laguna culture and to Silko’s early work up to and including Storyteller, which was in press and available to Seyersted when he published his analysis.
Silko, Leslie Marmon, and James Wright. The Delicacy and Strength of Lace: Letters Between Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright. Edited by Anne Wright. St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1986. Correspondence between Silko and poet James Wright from 1978 to 1980, in which Silko discusses Storyteller: its genesis and structure, the decision to include photographs, and several of the people, stories, and poems that appear. The best source for biographical information on Silko up to 1980.
Studies in American Indian Literatures 5, no. 1 (Spring, 1993). A special edition devoted to Storyteller. Linda Danielson summarizes its critical reception to 1993. Toby C. S. Langen discusses it as a treatise on literature at the same time that it is a work of literature. Robert M. Nelson compares Silko’s tellings of traditional Laguna stories to the tellings of John Gunn, which were published in 1917. Helen Jaskoski discusses five writing assignments related to Storyteller that provide insight into American Indian literatures and to literature in general. Also included are several photographs taken by Silko’s father that are relevant to Storyteller.
Wiget, Andrew. Native American Literature. Boston: Twayne, 1985. Discusses Silko’s achievement in terms of her realization of the possibilities of American Indian myths and storytelling as a principle for plot construction and characterization.