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 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “A Million Porcupines Crying in the Dark”
Chapter 4 opens with the same story about the earth being constructed on the backs of turtles. After the usual mention of stories being “all we are,” King tells the story of his friend Louis Owens, “a Choctaw-Cherokee-Irish writer” who killed himself (92). Louis and King “both knew that stories were medicine” (92), and King describes a summer Louis spent picking tomatoes until a mob attacked the black and Native workers in the working camp. Louis and the other young men had to walk many miles home from the camp, and King wonders if Louis thought about this story or another when he killed himself. King knows that, “whichever one it was, for that instant Louis must have believed it” (95).
Most of the chapter is about oral and written stories and how Native writers blend the two forms. King notes that there are two great assumptions about the power of written stories over oral stories. First is the idea that stories, “in order to be complete, must be written down” (95). Second is the idea that written literature “has an inherent sophistication that oral literature lacks” (97). King focuses his argument on disproving these assumptions through a discussion of modern Native literature.
King discusses recent Native books against the background of the works of white authors that came before. He notes that “the modern period in Native written literature” began in 1968 with N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize-winning House Made of Dawn (102). This is a book about the present and future of Native Americans rather than the past, as the past had been well mined (and mythologized) by white authors like James Fenimore Cooper, who wrote novels about the different “gifts” Indians and whites provided. To Cooper, white gifts are “gifts of Reason,” while Indian gifts are “gifts of Instinct” (105), gifts that create a dichotomy that reinforces racial hierarchies. Most modern Native writers are more interested in creating a “Native universe” that blends the present and the future, since to believe in the past as represented by Cooper is “to be dead” (106). This Native universe depends less on binaries of good and evil (among others) than on the belief that “trying to destroy [evil] is misguided, even foolish” (111). King also discusses another, more recent work of Native literature: Robert Alexie’s novel Porcupines and China Dolls. Like Momaday’s work, Alexie’s novel has a Native reader in mind, meaning the Native reader will understand it differently than a white reader will. King wonders if Louis would have lived a different life or not committed suicide if he’d been able to read more Native literature. He admits that he “doesn’t believe it” since he’s a “cynic” (118). However, King does recognize that whether Louis “lives or dies depends on which story he believes” (118).
Throughout the chapter King tells three stories. One is about a storm he encountered on the road while moving from Utah to Lethbridge, Alberta. The second is about playing in a basketball game in Lethbridge, when the other players were erroneously informed that King got a plate in his head from that same storm. The third is about a visit to an old man’s house, where the old man tells King a storm destroyed his tomato crops but that he’s OK since “it’s always good to have some ketchup” (113). King tells these stories often because they are “stories that help keep [him] alive” (119). This chapter ends with his usual declaration that the reader can make of the story what they will as they have “heard it now” (119).
Chapter 4 Analysis
King’s blending of oral and written traditions is more explicit in this chapter than in the others. He writes about Native writers like N. Scott Momaday, who touch on both forms in their own writing, while also noting that “the advent of Native written literature did not, in any way, mark the passing of Native oral literature” (101). In fact, King argues that both traditions are “talking to each other” in Native works (102). The Truth About Stories itself does a great deal of this blending. King often interjects his own asides into the writing, almost as though he’s right there with the reader, analyzing the reader’s own reactions to his writing. And the repetition of stories throughout the text, especially stories told slightly differently each time, adds to this blending of oral and written traditions. Thus, the format and voice King employs in the text further enhance his argument that Native writers make use of both written and oral traditions.
This chapter uses a cyclical structure. It begins and ends with the description of Louis Owens committing suicide, a structure King says follows that of Porcupines and China Dolls, which begins and ends with the main character putting “the barrel of a gun in his mouth” (118) and pulling the trigger. King’s own stories are also circular. The storm he encounters in the first anecdote (the move to Lethbridge) feeds a narrative detail in the second (the basketball game). And the person who invites him to the basketball game introduces him to the old man in the third story, which includes King recounting the first story. Such a recounting could, of course, lead into the second story, which could lead back into the third story, and so on. Thus, King implies that stories all feed each other and that everything starts anew, just as Native writers created a “Native universe” to “use the Native present as a way to resurrect a Native past” (106).
This chapter is thematically concerned with the ways literature has informed the Native experience. King argues that Native literature is different from Western literature in a few ways. For one, it tends to focus on the present and future rather than the imagined past. It also tends to blur or blend polarities rather than reinforce them. Finally, it tends to be written for Native audiences who will understand different things than the white audience. As King puts it, the “magic of Native literature” is “in the way the meaning is refracted by cosmology, the way understanding is shaped by cultural paradigms” (112). By this, he means that reading a book is like listening to an oral story—each person will get something different from a story, and as King says at the end of every chapter, they will “do with it what [they] will” (119).
Unlike previous chapters, there is very little historical context here besides details about the destruction of the library at Tenochtitlán and biographical details of Louis and the other writers. This makes sense, given that this is a chapter about writing new stories rather than examining the impact of past ones.
Finally, King gives a very detailed list of Native writers and the differences in their works. Though the chapter focuses on Momaday and Alexie’s books, King includes this list because he does not want to pigeonhole Native writers or create new binaries, especially as Native writers need to be read by both Native and non-Native audiences.
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