Reality and Myth Theme Analysis

For most of the story, the narrator is in a dream-like state, taking in the details of her surroundings but constantly doubting her senses. Reality blends indistinguishably with myth and mysticism during the time she spends with Silva. In the end, she decides to tell her family a version of the truth—that she was kidnapped by a Navajo rather than by a mountain spirit. By making the narrative a blend of realism and mythology, Silko blurs the boundary between reality and myth and suggests that no such boundary actually exists.

At various moments throughout the story, the narrator’s senses compete to shape her present reality. Her knowledge of her home—and who she is in that home on the other side of the mesa—conflict with her feelings as Yellow Woman connecting with the mountain spirit. Additionally, her proximity to certain spaces seems to influence her perception of reality. At Silva’s house in the mountains, she sits in silence and explains, “I drowsed with apricots in my mouth, and I didn’t believe that there were highways or railroads or cattle to steal.” When she wakes from her drowsing, she sees ants, which remind her of her family in the present, small and far below her. Like the ants, her family and community live on and “under” the ground—in houses made of bricks from the earth. In the mountains—above and away from that familiar world—she slips easily between myth and reality. Silva claims to be able to see the whole world from his spot on the mountain, where his vision is unobstructed, but the narrator cannot see her pueblo. Later, when riding down the mountains with Silva, she thinks she spots a town in the distance, but he tells her that there isn’t a town there. She saw what she expected to see and her eyes fooled her. Silva’s embrace of both the mythical and the real seems to give him a sense of clarity that the narrator lacks. In contrasting Silva and the narrator’s perception in this way, Silko further dismantles notions of a boundary between the mythical and the real, suggesting that those who seek to establish such a boundary (like the narrator) only end up clouding their vision.

Depending on one’s perception of their encounter, Silva oscillates between the roles of abductor and seducer. At times he uses physical force to take the narrator with him, and at times she fears violence from him. At other moments, she thinks of him fondly and misses him, imagining him waiting for her until they meet again one day. Her feelings about their interactions ebb and flow depending on how immersed she feels in the Yellow Woman mythology. The more she believes in their roles as Yellow Woman and ka’stina, the more their relationship feels appropriate—since their story is, after all, legendary. But when she clings to the other reality that she’s merely a woman from the pueblo with a family, a husband, and a child, the relationship feels wrong.  At times, the narrator claims to openly resist Silva, showing that his behavior is forceful. She says, "I walked beside him, breathing hard because he walked fast, his hand around my wrist. I had stopped trying to pull away from him, because his hand felt cool and the sun was high, drying the river bed into alkali.” The narrator explains, “he pulled me around and pinned me down with his arms and chest. ‘You don’t understand, do you, little Yellow Woman? You will do what I want.’ And again he was all around me with his skin slippery against mine, and I was afraid because I understood that his strength could hurt me. I lay underneath him and I knew that he could destroy me.” This moment in particular makes their relationship appear more like assault than a romantic affair. In the very next moment, however, she describes her tender feelings towards him, as “a feeling” overcomes her. After they are separated and the narrator makes her way home, she misses Silva and believes that he will be waiting for her again one day. Her initial resistance to Silva perhaps was more of her resistance to the mythology, and in trying to push him away, she had been seeking an arbitrary boundary between the mythical and the real. Now that she is free to return to her “real” life, however, she looks forward to blending the mythical and the real in the story she plans to tell her family.

At the end of the story, the mystical and realistic threads seem to join in harmony. The smells and sounds of home greet her when she returns to her family, reminding her and the reader that her family exists in a reality of highways, pickup trucks, and Jell-O. She keeps her Yellow Woman story to herself not because she doesn’t believe it, but because perhaps that isn’t a story her family would understand as real. She wishes her grandfather was around because he liked Yellow Woman stories. Like Silva, perhaps her grandfather could also “see the whole world” since he, too, seems to have accepted that the mythical and the real exist in harmony. The narrator’s choice to tell her family that she was abducted by a Navajo suggests that she knows it would be easier for them to accept that than it would be for them to believe that she had gone away with a mountain spirit. Living with a fixed boundary is more comfortable for them. Thus, her story once again demonstrates that the difference between myth and reality often depends on one’s perspective and willingness to relinquish control over boundaries.