The Names: A Memoir (1976). Content and Description

In the 1970 essay “The Man Made of Words,” Momaday wrote, “We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists of our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined” (55). Six years after publishing these words, Momaday released his autobiography, The Names: A Memoir, a chronicle of his youth and adolescence. With this work, he imagines himself, creating a Kiowa poet identity.

The Names consists of an explanatory introduction, a prologue, four main sections, and an epilogue. Part 1 describes Momaday’s ancestry and establishes his multicultural roots. He introduces several colorful characters, giving equal weight to his mother’s Scottish, French, and Cherokee forebears and his father’s Kiowa lineage. Part 2 chronicles Momaday’s boyhood as he adjusts to life in Arizona and New Mexico. Living among the Navajo and Pueblo peoples, Momaday melds the Plains and Southwest cultures and landscape.

In part 3, Momaday describes his struggle to accommodate conflicting worldviews. As he grows older, his worldly awareness expands; his psyche grows more tortured. Momaday captures the pain and confusion in stream of consciousness, a narrative technique that attempts to approximate the patterns of thought by abandoning conventional punctuation and narrative progression. Finally, part 4 explores Momaday’s life in Jemez, New Mexico, where he spent the remainder of his adolescent years.

As Momaday’s other prose works do, The Names demands much of its readers. Instead of giving a straightforward account of his life, Momaday creates a collage of memories, myths, landscapes, and lengthy commentary. As with House Made of Dawn and The Way to Rainy Mountain, frequent digressions make it difficult to piece together events in chronological order. Sometimes readers struggle to separate “reality” from imagination, what “actually” happened from what transpired in Momaday’s mind. Each of these techniques mirrors the novel’s function, demonstrating the complexities involved in forming an identity. Using himself as the example, Momaday illustrates how we are more than our experiences in the physical world and how our memories, desires, wants, needs, and pains help form our sense of self.

As with Momaday’s other works, the structure of The Names provides important clues to the text’s meaning. By arranging the book into four major sections, Momaday invokes a sacred number. For many Native American cultures, the number 4 represents the seasons and cardinal directions, which, taken together, symbolize balance, beauty, and harmony. In a certain respect The Names documents Momaday’s internal search for balance and beauty, a search that, if completed, will uncover his inner Kiowa spirit.

The question for Momaday is, What connects me to a culture from which I have been separated since infancy? The answer: language, myth, and imagination. Momaday emphasizes the importance of language in the memoir’s opening line: “My name is Tsoai-talee. I am, therefore, Tsoai- talee; therefore I am" The passage reworks Rene Descartes’s famous dictum, “I think, therefore, I am.” Descartes, a 17th-century French philosopher and one of the premier figures of the Enlightenment, was also worried about identity but in a much broader sense.

Unlike Momaday, Descartes wanted to establish foundational truths about human existence. The phrase I am, however, has a much more personal meaning for Momaday. It does not simply mean “I exist,” but rather “I am connected to something meaningful; my identity is secured; I understand who I am.” Although Momaday’s Indian name, Tsoai-talee, is only a word, it is his principal bond to the Kiowa tribe and its rich mythic tradition. Given to him by a Kiowa elder when Momaday was only six months old, the name translates as “Rock-tree Boy” and unites him with a mythical boy-turned-bear.

Many of the most poignant passages in The Names explore language’s potential to bridge the distance between individuals and communities. Momaday finds in the word Tsaoi-talee an enduring connection to the Kiowa community. Similar connections occur throughout, for instance, when he “talks” to ancestors who lived and died centuries ago. Of course, the text itself is Momaday’s most ambitious deployment of language as a unifying force. “And I wonder at the words,” Momaday ruminates. “What are they? They stand, they lean and run upon the page of a manuscript. . . . I trace the words; I touch myself to the words, and they stand for me. My mind lives among them, moving ever, ever going on. I lay the page aside, I imagine.”

For Discussion or Writing:
1. As its subtitle indicates, The Names is a memoir, a literary form in which the writer turns personal experience into a narrative (memoire is French for “memory”). Yet, Momaday does not simply “remember” events from his youth and recount them in this work. Instead, he explores different kinds of “memory,” expanding the concept to include not only his own experiences but also those of his ancestors and even Kiowa myths and legends.

Why does Momaday intersperse his own childhood recollections with his forebears’? Can one “remember” something that occurred when he or she was not present or did not occur at all? Think of some of your earliest childhood memories and analyze them for “truth.” Is there a difference between actual and imagined memory? Does it matter? What would Momaday say to this question? Support your answer with passages from the text.

2. What do you think of Momaday’s idea that we become what we imagine? Are there other factors outside our imaginations that shape who we are and how we see ourselves? If so, what are they? Can imagination override these factors?

Works Cited and Additional Resources:
Allen, Paula Gunn, ed. Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs. New York: MLA, 1983.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Native American Writers. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1998.
Brill de Ramirez, Susan Berry. Contemporary American Indian Literatures and the Oral Tradition. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999.

Brumble, H. David, III. American Indian Autobiography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Fleck, Richard F., ed. Critical Perspective on Native American Literature. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents, 1993.

Isernhagen, Hartwig. Momaday, Vizenor, Armstrong: Conversations on American Indian Writing. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.
Krupat, Arnold. The Turn to the Native: Studies in Criticism and Culture. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.

Larson, Charles. American Indian Fiction. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978. Lincoln, Kenneth. Native American Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
Lundquist, Suzanne. Native American Literatures: An Introduction. New York: Continuum, 2004.