homework must be done in 12 hours

ALQARAFI

Student’s Name: Abdullah Alqarafi

Professor’s Name: Melisa Sloat

Course: 1113

Date: 11/10/18

“The Man Made of words”

With his every publication since winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for his first time, Scott Momaday has proven that he is among the preeminent voices in Native American Literature. In his, The Man Made of Words, Momaday masterfully creates a collection of articles and essays. Clearer than ever, the writer excellently portrays his ability to contribution not just as an Indian writer, but also as a great American writer. Most of the pieces in this collection are very short, a few with just a single page or two. As a result, most readers often glance at these pieces, never taking their time to get into the subject matter of the piece. The purpose of this essay is to provide a detailed insight into Momaday’s work with the core objective of completely connecting the anecdote-driven pieces.

Arguably, it is very difficult to categorize Scott Momaday as a writer. Similarly, it is not easy to categorize the piece into a slot. It is a collection of essay, yet it is more than a collection. Some of the pieces are biographical, yet not a collection of biographical essays. However, most essays address the Native Americans and their experiences. It is only fair to conclude that Momaday is a traveler who studies the history as well as the oral traditions of wherever he goes. Momaday chronicles his pilgrimage as an excellent author by retelling through the thirty-eight essays in which he has variedly explored the themes of language, land, and self-identity. The book is basically in three parts. The first part is Momaday’s thoughts on storytelling and writing and the importance of stories. Momaday essays that Stories are statements which concern the human condition. To the extent that the human condition involves moral considerations, stories have moral implications. In the oral tradition stories are told not merely to entertain or to instruct; they are told to be believed. Stories are not subject to the imposition of such questions as true or false, fact or fiction. Stories are realities lived and believed. They are true.

Momaday’s words make the readers think, they challenge the readers’ own narrow worldview, they take them outside of their worldview, and they help them appreciate the worldview of other people and other cultures. But, more than that, his writing makes his audience conscious of history and more aware that they are products of their own history and places. People carry the past with them and they are part of a continuum. Perhaps more importantly, Momaday knows as did his Chinese intellectual forbearers that humans are not the center of that history, instead, they are a small part of it. He quotes Yvor Winters, his mentor and friend, "Unless we understand the history which produced us, we are determined by that history, we may be determined in any event, but the understanding gives us a chance.”

Momaday is also, like Confucius, a transmitter of stories. Like Confucius, he transmits the wisdom of the sages who came before him, among other things, the wisdom of the Native American tradition. This incantation from the Iroquois serves to illustrate. Momaday has a clear spiritual dimension. This shows up in another part of the book which might be said to be a travelogue. Momaday takes us to sacred places. It is a given that many of those places are sacred to Native Americans, but we also go to Chartres and even Zagorsk, which he calls “the heart of Russian Orthodoxy.” (Momaday, 74).The Trinity Monastery there inspires him and his recounting of how he was treated there makes the place real and Russian. His journey also takes him to St. Peters’ cathedral in Regensburg, Germany. His description of this place contrasts starkly with Trinity Monastery.

The final part of the book is, fittingly, stories. The author does not spoil the fun in this part either. The stories are particularly enjoyable because of the humor accompanied with them, especially the one called “An element of piety.” It is about his daughters, a black lab, a priest, a blessing and himself. The story is told in a style that is for lack of better words ‘tongue in cheek.’ As the book ended, Momaday take the audience back to their Daoist friends with this: "And now I wonder what it means that, after these years I should speak of the octopus? It may be that I saved its life, but I know very little about the life of an octopus, and I shall not presume to say what salvation is worth to either of us. Only, just now, as a strange loneliness, it occurs to me that this creature has for some years now, been of some small consequence in the life of my mind. And I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, there, deep within its own sphere of instinct, the octopus dreams of me." (Momaday, 53)

Equally important, there are two passages that will probably stand out to everyone who will interact with the book. According to Momaday “much of the power and magic and beauty of words consist not in meaning but in sound. Storytellers, actors, and children know this, too.” (Momaday, 7). The first shows the sacredness of language, and how language shapes human histories and our stories. Momaday is discussing oral tradition here as well, showing the reader how at times stories may seem "imperfect" to the outsider listening in, but at the same time just how true, honest, and perfect a story can be if you know what is or is not a flaw in the story's wording. He also demonstrate that the power present in word do not just lie in their sound, instead, they lie in the meaning of recollection and in his famous tale of arrow maker (Momaday, 53). Yet the "Introduction" in Part III of this collection is amazing truly brilliant, and delves into what makes a story and what story means for us all. Momaday writes “To tell a story in the proper way, to hear a story told in the proper way…, this is a very old and sacred business, and it is very good.” (Momaday, 163).

The Man Made of Words is primarily a record of existential act. The author again uses the piece to define alongside holding on to his Native American identity. The cultural Abyss that the author bridges is suggested by various autobiographical collection of glimpse. Having traveled the world, Momaday not only have friends, but also knowledge in intellectual and artistic circles. To add into the account is the fact that Momaday has gathered views on the topics he has focused on. He has given the true beliefs of the Native Americans and their sacred values printing their culture as oral tradition. The best pieces in the collection, such as a magnificent essay on Navajo place name combine with this epic to profoundly gather attention to local knowledge as well as the old ways of echoing and knowing. Momaday proclaims that paradise only exist in the library and also in “a prairie and a plain and the place of words in a state of grace," regardless of how incompletely the anecdotes are developed or marked for religious attention and the music memory.

Language is one of the most important parts of a person’s identity. It reflects a lot about a person, his culture and origin. The Sapir Whorf hypothesis reflects on language as well as on the effect of native language on a person’s thinking. Robert Chute in his poem “Sapir Whorf Hypothesis” reflects that language and thinking of a person differ from one place or the other. In this poem, he is talking about Eskimos who are the indigenous or native people of the northern circumpolar region. This poem describes the importance of word “snow” for the Eskimos as they spend their entire life surrounded by it. These people spend their entire lives around snow as they are native inhabitants of extremely colder regions. Their day to day information incorporates a lot of information about snow and hence, they have a huge vocabulary or a lot of different meanings for this word ‘snow’. (Chute) The writer tells us that Eskimos are excellent at making distinction at a lot of words concerning ice through phrases such as ‘an alphabets of flakes’. In view of this, we can define language as a structure of thought, and how it affects and influence our ideas even when we are not conversing audibly. One of the most influential lines of the poem is “Language colors what we know”. It provides us with vocabulary and knowledge to communicate with the other person. The poem in a way is also promoting language relativism i.e. it is taking us out of our perception and thinking about snow to the world and language of Eskimos, and understand the importance and meaning of ‘snow’ from their perspective. Hence, this poem is an accurate description of the idea defined by Sapir and Whorf that environment or culture of a place will have an effect of their thinking. Hence, once we try to shift our focus from understanding a particular thing from our perspective to other person’s thinking and knowledge, our languages will seem to connect and we will be to communicate more efficiently.

Both Momaday and Chute adds an excellent canon to the narrative literatures. Not only does the work have useful and perfect information arrangement for anybody interested in the Native American studies, the American literature, and the general Oral Tradition, but it also appeals to the audience who read mainly for entertainment. As a matter of fact, language is indeed a miracle of symbols and sounds that enable us to think, and therefore to define ourselves as human beings.

Work Cited

Momaday, N. Scott. "The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories." Passages (1997).

Chute, Robert M. “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.” J.stor, Institute of General Semantics, Mar. 1966.