Reading Notes : Heroes, Part A

One thing I really enjoyed so far about this reading is how long the stories are. Instead of individual stories per chapter, each of these takes up about three chapter for one story. I felt like this really helped with character and plot development. Also, unlike the Alaskan stories I read last week, these stories were a bit more realistic, in the sense that they took place (mainly) on earth with real animals and real events in nature. Everyone loves a good hero story, and all of these were untraditional in their own way which made them interesting. One that I particularly liked centered around a bluejay, whose selfish actions were the reason he got sent on a journey to begin with. But upon his return, despite overcoming many obstacles, his life is pretty much the same before. It was interesting how their definition of hero is quite different from those we typically think of. For humans, it means dominating as the top species. For animals, it usually means just surviving.

At times, animals and humans work together to accomplish a goal, but for about half of the stories, the man goes on a quest to kill a large mythical beast of some kind. This difference was interesting; some stories really show Native Americans' respect for animals and life, others have human heroes killing mythical beasts just for the sake of it. Also, when the hero is established, the people in their lives become insignificant. For example, there was one story about an evil uncle who would kill all his nephews, and even though the parent knew this, they sent their son to the uncle anyways, which I thought was really bad common sense. But they needed to do that in order for the son to become the hero he was supposed to be. The narrative style was really nice at immersing the reader in the setting.

Blue jay. source.

Tales of North American Indians. Stith Thompson (1929). Web Source.

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