The Way to Rainy Mountain

“It is appropriate that these discrete voices should be heard, that they should be read aloud, that they should remain, as they have always remained, alive at the level of the human voice. At that level their being is whole and essential. In the beginning was the word, and it was spoken.”

Momaday uses parallel structure to convey the influence of the oral tradition on The Way to Rainy Mountain. He further makes this point with an allusion to the first verse of the Book of John. In place of “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,” Momaday substitutes, “and it was spoken,” emphasizing the oral quality of the biblical act of creation. To create a world is to speak it into existence, exactly as the Kiowa storytelling tradition does.

“When the wild herds were destroyed, so too was the will of the Kiowa people; there was nothing to sustain them in spirit. But these are idle recollections, the mean and ordinary agonies of human history. The interim was a time of great adventure and nobility and fulfillment.

The dramatic polysyndeton that finishes this passage (“great adventure and nobility and fulfillment”) emphasizes the importance of the Kiowas’ century on the plains over the cultural and actual genocide that brought it to a close. Momaday takes away some of the power of that genocide when he refuses to center it in this story. Instead, he disparages it with his diction, dismissing it as a small, stingy, and uninteresting story by calling it “the mean and ordinary agonies of human history,” particularly when compared to the glorious days on the plains.