Reading N. Scott Momaday's Silences

Abstract: Although the Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday describes himself as "a man made of words," he is nevertheless inordinately drawn to silence. I argue that these silences are not so much the suspension of language, occurring unreachably beyond what is sayable, but silences that are themselves acts of communication and disclosure. Momaday employs silence in order to make something present in its very absence and to elicit ways of seeing and understanding that simultaneously mark the limits of the spoken word.