Continuing Trickster storytelling: The Trickster protagonists of three contemporary Indian narratives

The Trickster is perhaps the most significant figure in all the North American Indian oral narratives. This thesis contends that the Trickster figure is alive and exists as the protagonist of many contemporary American Indian novels. The authors of three novels under study here--House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday, Winter In the Blood by James Welch, and Griever: An American Monkey King In China by Gerald Vizenor--with varying degrees of consciousness employ elements of traditional oral stories, especially the Trickster protagonist of those stories, to create new Trickster narratives that address issues relevant to the contemporary world. Critics of contemporary American Indian fiction have failed to recognize that the Trickster is always the protagonist of a narrative; once one recognizes this fact, one can understand the novels more completely. Although Vizenor's protagonist is clearly a Trickster figure, Momaday and Welch's protagonists are not apparently so. However, once we focus on the many subtle characteristics of the Trickster, as this study does with help from various Trickster experts, one can see that they are indeed Tricksters, accompanied by elements of the old tales: unexplained incidents, symbolic inversions, irony, tricking and being tricked, betwixt and betweenness, marginality, teaching and learning. All three novels demonstrate the continuing importance of the teachings of the traditional texts.