Language and Storytelling Theme Analysis

While The Way to Rainy Mountain is the story of the Kiowa migration, it is also, at its heart, a story about stories. Throughout the book, Momaday emphasizes the importance of storytelling as a tool of Kiowa survival, and he meditates on the power of language to not only represent the world around him, but also to act in the world—for Momaday words can inspire emotions, they can create magic, and they are always powerful tools for understanding and shaping reality.

The Way to Rainy Mountain includes several stories that directly address the power of words. In the story of the giants’ cave words have magical properties; the twins say a mysterious word (passed to them through the Kiowa oral tradition) that keeps the smoke from suffocating them. In the story of the arrowmaker, the arrowmaker uses the Kiowa language as a password to determine if the man outside his tipi is friend or foe—here, too, it is words that save his life. Momaday also reflects on the word that Aho used when confronted with something frightening. He muses that this word was “not an exclamation so much, I think, as it was a warding off, an exertion of language upon ignorance and disorder.” Thus, for Momaday, language is a tool—almost a weapon, even—that can be leveraged against the world. In fact, Momaday even believes that certain ideas—such as “mankind’s idea of himself”—exist in language alone. In other words, Momaday argues that it is only through language that people are able to know themselves, and for that reason language is important to preserve and revere.

The beauty of Momaday’s prose—particularly in his descriptions of the southern plains landscape—illustrates another dimension of the power of language. Momaday writes in three different voices: the voice of tribal lore, which tends to be somewhat spare; the voice of written history, which tends to be straightforward and technical; and the voice of personal memory, which is lyrical and full of metaphor and image. The linguistic beauty of these personal reflections show the power of language to create feelings in a reader. It is through descriptions—Momaday’s simile that antelopes’ tails are “like a succession of sunbursts against the purple hills,” for instance—that readers get a sense of the sacredness of nature to the Kiowas. Were readers simply told the importance of landscape without being made to feel it through language, Momaday’s point would not have the same resonance.

Most important, Momaday emphasizes language as a tool for cultural survival. He writes, “A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things. By means of words can a man deal with the world on equal terms. And the word is sacred.” This can be seen as a key to the entire book: it’s a collection of words that Momaday uses to be on equal terms with the world. The Kiowas are a people whose culture has been under attack for more than a century by the U.S. government. With the Kiowa way of life in decline, it is in spoken language (the Kiowa oral tradition) that Kiowa culture and history are preserved. The Way to Rainy Mountain, then, is not simply a history that tells of the Kiowa past, but a living document that attempts to project Kiowa culture into the future by preserving its traditions for generations to come. The book can be seen as Momaday’s attempt to use language and storytelling to stake out his place in the world and actively maintain and promote a culture that might otherwise fade out of memory.