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N Sott Momaday The Way To The Rainy Mountain Analysis

Decent Essays

These lines extracted from N Sott Momaday’s “The Way to Rainy Mountain” aptly depict his conception of the reader’s role within this multi-genre text. “Literary Texts”, as famously articulated by Terry Eagleton, “are code-productive, code-transgressive as well as code-confirming…they may teach us new ways of reading , not just reinforce the ones with which we come equipped”. ( Eagleton, 116). Reaffirming this analogy, Momaday’s “The Way to the Rainy Mountain” empirically proposes to transgress old codes, disintegrate decisions, eventually leading to a creation of polyphony within literature by simultaneously performing “eternal happening”. Momaday has incessantly stressed upon his ideology associated with the powerful act of imagination. In an essay entitled “Native American Attitudes to the Environment”, he advocates “…we are all….at the most fundamental level what we imagine ourselves to be…..”. ( 80). The same intonation is reiterated in his proverbial lecture entitled “ Man made of words” where he eloquently elaborates “ “ We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves”. (3). This very notion finds a stance in the prologue of “The Rainy Mountain” where he proficiently assimilates his idiosyncrasies dealing with the creative power of imagination …show more content…

(Iser, 9)This hypothesis emphatically propagates the phenomenological reader response theory to decipher the process that co-relates the literacy work “The Way to the Rainy Mountain” to help us in identifying the openness portrayed in the text and the extent of reader participation. As one continue through the work, Iser says that having modified and undergone a retrospective effect on what has gone before, the reader strongly out-strips the actual causes of the

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