Summary Of The Way To Rainy Mountain

N. Scott Momaday is a Kiowan author who wrote, “The Way to Rainy Mountain,”on the occasion of his grandmother’s death. In his artistic recounting of his childhood home, he remembers his grandmother and how the landscape is so deeply ingrained with who they are as people. Momaday’s desire is to be able to convey his grandmother’s way of life and culture. He is writing this for himself, to keep the idea and the vision of his grandmother alive, immortalizing her through at times factual, descriptive and intimate language. Momaday begins his tribute to his recently deceased grandmother by introducing the audience to the Kiowa people, a Native American tribe that lived originally in Oklahoma. In the opening of his essay, Momaday uses ethos

He establishes a strong, authoritative presence, by beginning the second sentence with, “For my people;” the use of the pronoun ‘my’ gives him credibility on the history and home of the Kiowa. This credibility allows the reader to believe the creation story that he later recounts in the third paragraph as authentic to the Kiowa people. As the introduction continues, Momaday expresses the powerful connection of the Kiowa people to the land through his use of imagery. He illustrates this connection of the land with the people that live on it, writing, “All things in the plain are isolate; there is no confusion of objects in the eye, but one hill, or one tree or one man.” By listing a tree, a hill and a man, it shows that this series of items are each intricately connected and are no different than each other in how they relate to the landscape. Additionally, Momaday emphasizes figurative language throughout the essay, focusing

He does this to create a more intimate retelling of his grandmother, appealing to pathos by adopting an intimate tone, and is more nostalgic while discussing his childhood. Furthermore, he reflects on the impact the land plays on his own life. In contrast to Momaday’s earlier paragraphs, he explains memorable moments of his childhood by employing an almost solely pathos appeal. In the third to last paragraph, he writes, “When I was a child I played with my cousins outside, where the lamplight fell upon the ground and the singing of the old people rose up around us and carried away into the darkness.” This is a more personal tone than we have heard from Momaday in the previous half of the essay and creates more depth to this story. After he discusses these childhood memories Momaday ends the essay with a strong reflective piece on the land and how tied it is to his family and their experiences. “ There, where it ought to be, at the end of a long and legendary way, was my grandmother's grave. Here and there on the dark stones were ancestral names. Looking back once, I saw the mountain and came away.” As Momaday has not used such a personal tone before, these last paragraphs are even more impactful as a