Rice, Julian

James Welch draws parallels between characters of Blackfeet mythology and those of his novel to express the interwoven relationship between the spiritual realm and the camp circle's daily life, a relationship grounded in the tribe's myths and continuously renewed through its ceremonial practices. Fools Crow becomes an extension of the mythic cultural hero Scarface; Yellow Kidney amplifies the cautionary tale of Seco-mo-muckon, the young fire tender whose dreams of power divert him from his duty to the camp circle; Fast Horse becomes a reflection of Nopatsis, who, in the story of the Beaver Medicine, turns against his brother. It was through the retelling of these myths that the Blackfeet sought to pass to successive generations cultural values and spiritual beliefs that would assure what emerges as the novel's fundamental concern--survival in the face of great loss. Welch extends the myth of Feather Woman and in the tradition of the tribe's mythic cultural heroes, Fools Crow gains from her knowledge important to the survival and restoration of future generations of Blackfeet.

The individual's survival in a hostile, postmodern environment is a principal
theme of Jerzy Kosinski's Cockpit. Tarden, the preeminent survivor in this
landscape, equates survival with control. He achieves control, both of himself
and others, by aggressive forms of psychological and physical manipulation. The
final goal of this manipulation is the absolute subversion of death. As he ages,
Tarde!} realizes that death can only be diverted, and· his strategies to a void the
inevitable become more sophisticated. Initially a being of action, he finally
seeks refuge in words, in confession. Yet his confession is a violent parallel to
his life; as such it becomes another diversionary act. The reader, at whom the
confession is directed, is the target of this will to control and its violence.

In the reading of William Faulkner's The Sound and the
Fury and As I Lay Dying, the reader's preconceived ideas
about sanity and insanity change through identification
with each character. Both novels are told from multiple
points of view. The reader's transition from one section
of the novel into the next reflects crossing a threshold
beyond which definitions of sanity must be reformulated.
This creative process, mimetic of the writer-text relationship,
leads to acceptance of all states of consciousness,
which are represented by sections of the novel, as
part of the whole. Insanity becomes the fragmen t ation
between each section, or state of consciousness, and the
whole. This fragmentation appears in characters as hate,
despair, and rage. Sanity emerges as wholeness and
integration, represented in the novel and actualized in
the reader as acceptance and love.

William Blatty's The Exorcist can be effectively read
as a contemporary saint's life. A study of traditional
hagiography reveals how closely Blatty's novel conforms
to the traditional pattern. Father Karras, Blatty's
hero, confronts the mystery of evil in the demon Pazuzu
who has inhabited the body of an eleven-year-old girl.
Like the traditional saints, Karras exorcises the demon
only through personal sacrifice. In so doing he takes
the sins of the other upon him self and becomes a
living example of the "mystery of goodness." Like his
hagiographic predecessors, however, Karras must suffer
a fall into despair before achieving sainthood. In The
Exorcist this fall (ultimately fortunate) takes the form
of a tormenting religious skepticism and soul-killing
scientific rationalism. By the end of the novel, however,
modern rationalism has been redeemed by the
reemergence of a mystical good, which, in the traditional
Christian paradox, can only come into being through the
machinations of a mystical evil.