Native American Literature

Both The Soft-Hearted Sioux by Zitkala-Sa and The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky by Stephen Crane are episodic in structure. In The Soft-Hearted Sioux we are given the firsthand account of a Sioux who becomes Americanized and Christian through missionary teachings. When he returns to his native people and culture, he is rejected because his new learning makes him foreign and impractical to the natives and their way of life. He cannot hunt buffalo or deer and he is not a warrior, so as a male Sioux he is viewed as pretty much useless, not to mention bringing back to them an ideology of a people who would ultimately rob them of their lands and decimate their culture. In the end, the narrator reverts to his instincts and Sioux nature; killing a buffalo and murdering a white man who tries to take it from him. These efforts, all in vain to reconcile him with his culture or father, makes the narrator, sentenced to death, as torn in faith about the nature of the afterlife as in life he was torn between two cultures and faiths, “Yet I wonder who shall come to welcome me in the realm of strange sight. Will the loving Jesus grant me pardon and give my soul a soothing sleep? or will my warrior father greet me and receive me as his son? Will my spirit fly upward to heaven? or shall I sink into the bottomless pit, an outcast from a God of infinite love?” (Zitkala-Sa 6).

The episodic nature of The Soft-Heart

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spite his missionary and Christian learning. In episode V we see the narrator turn himself in and question his faith and afterlife. He is not afraid to face it because he has lived torn between two cultures and faith and has ended pleasing neither nor himself. The importance of seeing all of these episodes, each with its different mini-theme is because they all tie together to demonstrate the overarching theme of the story. This theme is how difficult it is to find self-satisfaction and authentic external belonging when one is torn between two cultures, two lifestyles, and two religions. It destroys the narrator and leaves him awaiting his death in confusion. In Stephen Crane’s The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, we are treated to another episodically structured story. In these four episodes we are witness to the story of Yellow Sky sheriff Jack Potter. Potter has taken himself a bride in San Antonio, a woman neither very pretty nor very young. She is a woman who looks as if she cooks and will dutifully cook. Though he and his bride enjoy a nice if awkward train ride to Yellow Sky, Potter is concerned in episode I that he might have invoked the disapproval of the inhabitants of Yellow Sky because he did not dutifully discuss
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1813
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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