The Way to Rainy Mountain

Juxtaposition is the technique of placing two (or in this case, three) disparate items side by side in the hope of generating new insights about each. Momaday’s unique, collage-like structure within the stories often avoids explicit connections or transitions and instead relies on the reader to make connections between the ancestral voice, the historical voice, and his personal reflections, making juxtaposition one of his central literary devices in this text.

For example, Story XVI juxtaposes three images of buffalo: the mighty, steel-horned monster that menaces the hunter in the ancestral voice’s story; the sad, old, tame buffalo killed by two old Kiowa men in a mock buffalo hunt in Carnegie, Oklahoma in the early 20th century, and the mother buffalo that chases Momaday and his father in Medicine Park and sets their hearts pounding. These three stories, though lacking explicit transitions or comparisons between them, invite those comparisons nonetheless. As Momaday and his father feel their “hearts beating fast,” they are sharing in some part of the experience of the hunter chased into the tree by the metal buffalo and, in a larger sense, experiencing a portion of the awe and terror that the Kiowa hunters must have known in their days on the plains (55).