Week 2 Analysis: Coyote Cooks His Daughter

Literary Elements

The character that I found most interesting in this story was Coyote. Obviously the title gives away the plot of the story to come, but if I had not read the title and gone straight into the story without reading the title, then Coyote seems like a normal character with a nice family that lives on the foot of a mountain for whom he has to go find dinner for. As the story progresses it is obvious that he is getting frustrated because he cannot find food, but instead of continuing to look or going hungry for the evening, he suddenly decides to kill and cook his daughter for dinner. The author of this story doesn't go into great detail, but from what I can gather Coyote seems to have absolutely no remorse for what he has done. Even after his daughter's spirit arises from the pot and begins to speak to them, the story goes: "Coyote was still there cooking" (Cupeńo 54). Our main character does not show any emotion or even speak a word for that matter until his wife sets the house on fire and his life is threatened, yelling "Oh, old woman, old woman, don't burn me, don't burn me!"(Cupeńo 55). I found it very interesting that through killing his daughter he shows no remorse, but as soon as his life is in danger he is quick to plead for it.

Themes

As I said in my notes, this story was very hard for me to wrap my mind around. The writing is very simple but the message the author is trying to convey is not easy for me to figure out. The more I have grappled with this story in the last two days, the more I think I might finally be onto something. I think that a theme the author is trying to get across is that nature, both human and creature, can be very cruel and unforgiving. Our main character in this story killed and cooked his own daughter after one day of not being able to find food, not unlike how grizzly bears will eat their own if they are hungry enough. This is a very cruel world that we live in, and there is one thing that all animals and most humans care about more than anything else in the world, and that is their own survival. Our main character did not care about anything other than his own survival this entire story from killing his daughter to eat, to screaming when his life was threatened, self preservation was his singular focus.

Context

I think that the historical and cultural context of this story had a huge influence on the authors work. I don't think anyone living in San Francisco in 2018 would think for a second that someone would be capable of doing something like this, in fact, I'm sure most people don't know that this happens regularly in the animal kingdom. Obviously the Coyote was much more prevalent in Native American culture than it it is in our culture today, we only think of them as being something that could threaten out pets if we life outside of a city. I think the historical period of when this was created also has a lot of influence on the story, because if it were written today there would not be a frightening scarcity of food like there is in this story. I don't think that you would see a story like this written in this day and age in our modern culture, and because of that I found it to be a very interesting story.