Something that I particularly enjoyed about reading Green Grass, Running Water was the different narrators and narrative styles that all blend together in the novel. The first person engaging with Coyote as the framing narrative, the oral style of the creation stories as told by Four Old Indians, and the third person restricted telling of the modern stories of Lionel, Alberta, and Eli. The second one is most interesting to me, because it is far less common than the others. Rather than pick a point of view and run with it, the narrator is one of the Four Old Indians, despite the fact that each time they take a turn telling their creation story, it starts with the four of them getting organized enough to start the story. They are characters in their own tales that they themselves are telling, and that stuck with me throughout the whole novel.
When I first read the Four Old Indians, I only understood two of the four cultural allusions. I assumed each one was somehow related to a portrayal of a First Nations character, but I didn’t know who Ishmael was, and the only Hawkeye I knew of was the Marvel character. To be honest, I didn’t try looking up these other two characters, partially because most of the time I was reading this while on the bus, and partially because I expected the meaning of each name to become clear as the story progressed. I got that with Ishmael, recognizing the story of the white whale, but I had never heard Hawkeye’s story before.
After finishing the novel, I Google searched a couple of references that I recognized as such, but didn’t know enough about. I read up a little more on Ishmael, primarily interested in his relationship with Queequeg. I also discovered Hawkeye is only one name of many for the character Natty Bumppo, from James Fenimore Cooper’s series, The Leatherstocking Tales. Natty Bumppo is a meeting point between the romanticized “Indian” nature and European/American civilization, much like Robinson Crusoe and the Lone Ranger.
The story from which each of these characters come exemplifies the power dynamic between the Civilized White Man and the Noble Savage. King deliberately turns this dynamic on its head by presenting the Indigenous women as the main hero character, coerced into their role by their interaction with the irrational white men in their stories. King also mixes in various European/American cultural myths: the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark, and Moby Dick, to name a few. Including cultural myths beyond just creation stories identifies the assumptions made about each role, and the confines within which they are forced to exist. It is only the Women who are able to break free from the boundaries of the recognizable tales, whereas the characters they encounter resist any changes with all their might. This may reflect the origins of each story; the Women come from an oral tradition, whereas the European/American cultural myths are all written literature, where change and organic evolution of stories is almost unheard of.
King’s blending of these cultural myths questions the value of an unchanging canon, and the Four Old Indians’ tales create an overall creation story of their own origins, as well as the current condition of the world, which, coincidentally, the Four Old Indians are trying to change, one story at a time. This time, the story is that of Lionel, Alberta, and Eli.
WORKS CITED
“Fenimore’s Natty Bumppo.” James Fenimore Cooper: a Literary Pioneer. American Studies at the University of Virginia. Web. 10 November 2016.
“Ishmael.” Moby Dick. Shmoop. Web. 12 November 2016.