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영어

This study explores Almanac of the Dead, the Native American writer Silko's apocalyptic novel. This novel is a harsh indictment of the United States, and demands justice for the dead and the oppressed. In order to resist cultural and spiritual genocide, Silko, deconstructing the form of the novel, experiments with fragmented narratives and weaves dozens of interconnected tales to rewrite five hundred years of American history and envision a future where the tribal people of the Americas retake the land from governments that are corrupt at every level. So this essay is designed to elaborate one of the ways she replaces with Indian cultures those destructive western cultures which have oppressed the Americas throughout the past 500 years. Above all, she wants to alter the reader's sense of time, because Indian time is circular while Western time, justifying the European progress model, is linear. Further, each day has its own identity, and the day returns to the same place where the story had happened earlier but with its details changed. This process symbolically strengthens the potential for the ancestor's prophecy. Especially in a cycling time, a person is thought of as “a moving event shaped by and shaping human and non-human surroundings” (Allen 149). So in Almanac of the Dead, there is no character development. Consequently it means that to restore Indian time is to turn back to the pre-colonized time over the Americas, leading to a resurrection of Indian cultural identities.