Leslie Marmon Silko's Yellow Woman

1543 Words4 Pages

“Yellow Woman” written by Leslie Marmon Silko is a short story based on a Native American Legend story. In this Legend story, a woman has been taken away from her family for a period of time. The Yellow Woman are taken by a Ka’tisna spirit which is better known as a mountain spirit. Throughout the story, the reader learns that the narrator is in an overarching battle with her personal identity as a Pueblo Indian Woman. On top of the narrator's battle with understanding her personal identity she is in a constant battle with trying to understand what events are happening in real life as well as what events are remnants of this legend story told by her grandfather. In sum, the struggle that the narrator has is the common theme occurring throughout. …show more content…

This legend story her grandfather had read to her as a child had always been something she had always been aware of, and as she continues to experience events that have remarkable similarities to the story causes her to question who she really is. The narrator does suggest though that one person would believe these events from the past could happen in the future, that person would be her grandfather. This is seen in the text by the narrator saying “ but if old Grandpa weren’t dead, he would tell them what happened— he would laugh and say, “ stolen by a ka’tsina, a mountain spirit”” (Silko 576). This line really adds to the readers understanding of how this event happened in the past. The narrator’s grandfather had lived in a time where these stories likely had occurred and woman had gone missing for several days and came back. For the narrator, though, she had been accustomed to today’s society where if a woman went missing people were less likely to think she was taken by a mountain spirit. Not only people wouldn’t believe she was taken from a mountain spirit, many people would not believe her story as it had been something that occurred in the

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