Leslie Marmon Silko, “Storyteller”, Native-American Novel, conjoined relations, collective authorship, bildungsroman

Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Storyteller” in her hybrid collection, Storyteller, is indeed a story about being a storyteller. An anonymous Eskimo girl, under the influence of the communal oral tradition, learns what it is to have the power of telling and retelling stories in the process of searching for her own story. Her narrative authority as the proprietor of her own story is, however, denied by her own self. The heroine struggles to conjoin her story with the old stories told by her tribal ancestry. She is, therefore, totally different from a typical hero or heroine of the Western Bildungsroman, whose quest is directed to establish original and unique self against an unbending social order. The heroine creates her story through her collaborative interactions with diverse layers of beings−that is, her native land, her family, members of her community, her ancestors, and even her opponents. Despite the fragmentary, ambiguous, and indeterminable characteristics of her story she is marvellously able to, erotically sometimes, graft and fuse the stories of those layers together into her own one. The sacred ability of storytelling, the most important ceremonial trait to establish human identity among the heroine’s tribe, finally confirms her full-blown membership in her community. English majors in our universities, many of whom are arguably outsiders with regard to the Native American literary tradition, are invited to experience this beautiful piece of story in a big Hopi basket as a way to enhance their awareness of the diverse constituents of English literature.