Analysis Of Tony's Story By Silko

War is supposed to have a victor, right? The clock is ticking, right? Wrong. Our conventional paths of thinking are liable to lead us astray at times. Perhaps they fail to consider nuance? Maybe growth? Or even some freshly discovered flaw? While these moments initially seem daunting, they actually permit room for people to engage in the courageous search for new paths of epistemologies. Leslie Marmon Silko’s short story, Tony’s Story, serves as an example of the product of this new courageous form of thinking. In Tony’s Story, Silko, suspends time through the manipulation of the environment to illustrate how natives are engaged in a cultural war, where the best outcome is a pyrrhic victory. The first method Silko uses to suspend time is the

But, pueblo culture is compromised. For one, a gun is a tool of colonization, which was used, historically, to subjugate and slaughter natives—like pueblos. So, Tony and Leon had to use the tools of the oppressor to kill the oppressor. But, part of Tony dies as well. Notice the line: “But he was motionless on the ground and the bone wand lay near his feet.” In an earlier moment, Silko writes that the Cop holds a billy club, but in this moment, a weapon of state violence transforms into a weapon of mythic violence. The bone wand resonates from stories Tony is told as a child (363), and so the description of the wand laying beside the dead Cop implies that Tony’s childhood has been shot too. In other words, this moment represents a coming-of-age story or bildungsroman. Finally, natives are known to have an intimate relationship with nature and their environment, and this relationship is also bloodied, literally. Silko describes how the tumbleweeds and tall grass are sprayed with the Cops’ “heavy blood”, and she even uses the word “soak,” in the same sentence where she talks about the drought and lack of rain, which conjures up unsettling imagery. The liquid the plants absorb into their stems is blood. In other words, the bloodshed that results from violence constitutes the new sustenance for plants. The water cycle will no longer ensure nutrition and sustenance because the cycle of

The drought that occurs in the short story has drastic effects on vegetation and the natural world: “The sky was hot and empty. The half-grown tumbleweeds were dried up flat and brown beside the highway, and across the valley heat shimmered above wilted fields of corn. Even the mountains high beyond the pale sandrock mesas were dusty blue” (363-364). The stagnancy of the weather situates the plot in an interminable present. Pueblo culture has a strong relationship to the natural world, which is shown through Tony’s hyper-awareness of the weather as the narrator. Furthermore, if the weather never changes, then as a domino effect, the plants remain in their same growth stage and people’s behavior, like clothing, never alters as well. This suspension of times represents a cultural war because the pueblo live off the environment, but if there is no rain, how will plants grow? How will animals eat on the plantation? Then, how are people to eat? The very livelihood of the natives is in jeopardy because of weather’s stagnancy. This means that the natives are in a fight for survival, which is symbolic of their culture’s fight for survival. Finally, Silko shows that the best outcome is a pyrrhic victory because of the ambiguity of the ending: “The tumbleweeds around the car caught fire, and little heatwaves shimmered up toward the sky; in the west, rain clouds were gathering” (366). Focusing on the rain