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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Green Grass, Running Water, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Indian Culture and White Culture
Storytelling
Oppression and the Justice System
The Power of Nature
Summary
Analysis
At the beginning of creation, the narrator says, there was just water. Coyote is asleep and dreaming. One of Coyote’s Dreams gets free and starts looking around, seeing all the water. The Dream wants to be a coyote, but Coyote won’t allow it, so the Dream decides to be both a dog and a god. The Dream, now GOD, wonders what to do with all the water, but Coyote tells it to just relax.
This novel has several different plot lines, some of which occur inside others. At the very top layer of the story are Coyote and the narrator. Coyote is based on a trickster god who appears in the stories of several Indian cultures. The narrator is also like a god—the nameless narrator exists even before GOD did, suggesting that storytelling is so fundamental to human life that it even predates religion.
Themes
