83 pages • 2 hours read
Thomas KingThe Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “‘You’ll Never Believe What Happened’ Is Always a Great Way to Start”
King opens Chapter 1 the same way he opens all others except the Afterwords. He writes, “There is a story I know. It’s about the earth and how it floats in space on the back of a turtle” (1). He explains that every time the story is told it changes slightly, but the fundamental aspects of the story never change. For example, “The world never leaves the turtle’s back. And the turtle never swims away” (1). He continues the story by explaining that the turtle is atop another turtle which is atop another turtle and so on (1). In response to a young girl’s question about how many turtles there are, the storyteller admits to not knowing but that “it’s all the way down” (2).
King then states (as he will throughout the text) that “the truth about stories is that that’s all we are” (2). He goes on to recount stories about his mother and father. His mother took a job with Boeing in 1963 and found that she was discriminated against because she was a woman, while his father abandoned the family. King’s brother was eventually contacted by their father’s new family after their father had passed. King tells the reader these stories to show that “stories can control our lives” (9).
The chapter primarily discusses two separate creation myths, one from a Native American tradition and one from Christianity. In the Native story, a woman falls from the sky and meets talking animals who help her build the earth on the back of a turtle. The animals cooperate to create a beautiful world out of the chaos of a woman falling from the sky. In the Christian version—the story of Adam and Eve being kicked out of the Garden of Eden—a rule is broken, and humans are doomed to fend for themselves in a “wilderness in which sickness and death, hate and hunger are their constant companions” (22). King argues that the stories create two different worlds: “a world marked by competition” and “a world determined by co-operation” (25). This, he says, is just one of many dichotomies humans have created for themselves, for “if we believe one story to be sacred, we must see the other as secular” (25). These dichotomies justify racism and poverty, and leave no place for “enigmas” like his father, a man who King feels left the family but not because of a lack of love (25).
King wonders what such dichotomies do to the world and how our world might be different if the stories were blended, or if the Christian one was softened by a more forgiving God. He ends the chapter as he ends all chapters but the Afterwords—by telling the reader to do with the Native creation story what they will. However, the reader should not “say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story” because “you’ve heard it now” (29).
Chapter 1 Analysis
Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the mix of historical analysis, literary quotations, objective facts, stories, and personal narrative that King uses throughout the text. It also introduces King’s distinct voice, which blends figurative language, repetition, sarcasm, humor, and a conversational tone. The mixture of sources and styles create a postmodern text that explores identity and the role of stories in society and history. By blending the personal with the universal, King further highlights the idea that all life is a story and that stories make us who we are. Finally, the book’s repetitive structure and conversational tone make it clear King is communicating as a Native oral storyteller while also writing as a Western writer and academic.
In opening the chapter with the myth that the earth stands atop turtles, King introduces several themes at once. He makes sure to note that a story can be repeated many times and change slightly, suggesting that stories are living things that vary in meaning based on who speaks or writes them and who hears or reads them. However, King also admits that parts of stories are not known by anyone, including the author, but that many details do not really matter so long as the main ideas are conveyed.
King presents paradoxical views throughout the book. In this chapter, he writes that he, as a storyteller, understands that some details can actually change the story even if the beginning and ending do not change. King makes that point about his father, an “enigma” who cannot be placed in the “dichotomies” society constructs about good and evil or fair and unfair (25). King has come to see that his father did not leave him because of a lack of love but for other reasons. That realization changes his perception of his father, even though the beginning and end of the story do not change. In short, his father still leaves his family, but the reason for leaving makes King think of his father differently. Thus, the middle parts of that story make a difference, whereas the specific details of the turtle story change but do not make him think differently of the turtles.
Finally, King ends the chapter by introducing another point about stories: They can influence the way the world is constructed. He asks whether “the stories we tell reflect the world as it truly is” or if we “simply start[ed] out with the wrong story” (26). In asking this question, he introduces the idea that stories allow us to construct a worldview that can be used to justify good behavior or bad behavior, meaning that stories can reflect the truth or create artifice, but they impact the world either way.
King ends this chapter as he ends the others, by telling the reader to take the story he’s told and “do with it what you will,” so long as you don’t pretend your life would be different if you had heard it since “you’ve heard it now” (29). Thus, he suggests that even if stories can be used to create image or reflect reality, they should not be used as excuses, even though stories are often used as exactly that. The other major theme throughout the book is that we all are the stories we believe. So King is suggesting that what we do with the stories we believe determines what and who we are.
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