Tillamook

Fantastic impossibilities in Indian stories are introduced to enable listeners to imagine familiar experiences, such as disturbing tensions of ordinary family and communal life. Sore Back in the opening of this story is simultaneously a boy and a weird fish. How are we to understand this? Indian storytelling does not merely recount a sequence of events but also relates every event to others through counter-sequential structures of parallelism and contrast. Sore Back is derided and mutilated because he has been orphaned. He is so desperate for companionship that he accepts humiliating treatment because it allows him to associate with the other boys. Furthermore, the boys escape from Wild Woman (whose lack of grandchildren contrastively parallels Sore Back's lack of parents) solely because of Sore-Back, who of course gets no credit. This all-too-common injustice is given imaginative physical form in Sore-Back's bizarre physiology.

Sore Back vanishes after the opening paragraphs, but the story is filled with characters and events that through parallelism and contrast with his situation articulate diverse forms of common familial-social difficulties. Bald Eagle's daughter is abused by her own family until she is literally turned into a mole by unfair favoritism for an adopted son. The dysfunctionality of the family of Bald Eagle (who finds a child on the shore where Wild Woman kidnapped children) is the exact opposite of the incestual disaster that destroys the foundling's parents. Mole's adopted brother later befriends a ridiculed and ostracized former suitor of his wife by restoring His-Bones-Have-Been-Sucked to communal respect as a fisherman his degradation deriving from his humiliation when disguised as a fish. For the Tillamook listener, who has heard the story before, and may even have told it herself, its primary interest lies in these complex systems of paralleling contrasts that can connect His-Bones-Have-Been-Sucked all the way to Sore Back, against the cause-effect sequentiality of the basic narrative.

Rhetorical devices of every kind work in opposition to sequential order to stimulate the audience to imagine how mythical events offer insight into comononplace practicalities of contemporary living. It is to us "unrealist" that Wild Woman again and again descends on the beach to seize the sleeping children, who again and again escape from her in the same fashion (note how this "unrealist" reiteration is echoed by the later unsuccessful killings of Wild Woman). Indian listeners do not take such repetitions literally but as invitations, first, to imagine all the emotional, social, and moral pressures manifested in the action that is repeated, and, second, to contemplate its relevance to the circumstances of their present life. Indian stories are structured to facilitate practical audience imaginative activity.

The rich narrative of the amazing rise of Placed-Next-to-Testicles from a disgraceful heritage to heroic stature as generous redeemer of a failed rival also serves as a vehicle for provoking thought about familiar (but difficult to discuss openly) familial dysfunctions. Wild Woman truly desires grandchildren that she is denied by her infertility (it seems right that her violent sex with Crane produces no offsping), yet it is her curse that kills the youngsters of whom she became so fond. Placed-Next-to-Testicles achieves the power to revenge himself on the killer of his parents, but then turns that power against its source, Thunder, wifeless father of a beautiful daughter pathologically hostile to all her suitors. Having overcome this exaggeration of "natural" paternal affection, and helped poor His-Bones-Have Been-Sucked, our hero's final act is abuse of his power in order to mutilate his father-in-law. All unhappy families are unhappy in different, but not unconnected, ways.

The story's rhetorical structuring makes inescapably vivid how every positive emotion possesses the potential for being perverted. Each violently exaggerated action is counterpointed by the parallelism of an equally violently contrasting episode. This creates a

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