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Stream of Consciousness
1. The Longhair, July 20
Explanation and Analysis:
The novel's style is poetic and nonlinear. Momaday lingers over images, especially when it comes to the natural world, in a way that makes it seem as though time moves in a circle instead of a straight line. One example occurs in Chapter 1, when Momaday sets the scene and introduces Francisco:
On the town side of the river there are a few orchards and patches of melons and grapes and squash. Every six or seven years there is a great harvest of piñones [...]. That harvest, like the deer in the mountains, is the gift of God.
It is hot in the end of July. The old man Francisco drove a team of roan mares near the place where the river bends around a cottonwood. The sun shone on the sand and the river and the leaves of the tree, and waves of heat shimmered from the stones.
Momaday switches verb tenses in the second paragraph, at the moment when Francisco's story begins. When Momaday describes the land, he uses the continuous present tense: the harvest still happens every six years, just as it always has, and temperatures are high at the end of every July. Francisco, on the other hand, "drove" the team of horses at a distinct moment in the past. The abrupt switch from ongoing present tense to simple past tense immediately juxtaposes the short, quick timeline of a human life against the long, repeating timeline of the natural world. And yet, Momaday does not separate Francisco from the natural world. The images of "the sun [that] shone on the sand and the river and the leaves of the tree, and waves of heat [that] shimmered from the stones" make it clear that Francisco's short life is part of this place where the late July weather casts a heat shimmer every year. He is part of the circle of life.
The way Momaday uses poetic language and nonlinear storytelling, even bouncing around from one character's perspective to another, is important to the novel's critique of industrial colonialism. By the middle of the 20th century, when the novel is set, industrial manufacturing made up a huge part of the United States economy. It involved the exploitation of both land and labor to turn a profit. It created a dominant worldview in which forward progress, productivity, and the competitive accumulation of wealth were the meaning of life. Abel briefly works a manufacturing job but struggles to show up ready to work at consistent hours. He grows increasingly angry and depressed because he cannot see a life for himself where he can hold down a job and accumulate meaningful wealth. Momaday's novel offers an Indigenous worldview as an alternative to industrial colonialism. In this framework, the meaning of a life has nothing to do with wealth or with maximizing productivity at every moment. Instead, a single life's meaning lies in its connection to others and the ongoing circle of life, which exists not to get anywhere except back where it started.
Related Themes:
