SOURCE: Salyer, Gregory. “Storyteller: Spider-Woman's Web.” In Leslie Marmon Silko, pp. 58-84. New York: Twayne, 1997.

In the following essay, Salyer provides a stylistic analysis of Storyteller.

If Ceremony challenges the genre of the novel, then Storyteller challenges the idea of the book.¹ An awkwardly bound compilation of photographs, mythology, gossip, short stories, and poetry, Storyteller enhances the uses of form to convey the dynamics of oral storytelling. The appearance of the book itself, with its elongated page-width, shorter page-length, and photographs, invites the interpretation that one is looking at a scrapbook or family album. Indeed, this is the case except on a much larger scale that involves Laguna history, animals, and the earth. There are stories of children, animals, and innocence as well as of adults, their creations, and the tragedies of experience. In spite of what seems on the surface to be a hodgepodge of genres and...