Thomas King Not Just the

Thomas King Not Just the Story, but the Storyteller Thomas King and Rohinton Mistry are both writers putting forth a minority viewpoint, telling the stories of communities that are usually silenced. As they speak for people whose stories would otherwise fall away they bring to the attention of the reader not only the themes and motifs of the peoples whom they represent but also bring to the fore the importance of telling stories to begin with.

In the two works examined in this paper the authors weave the theme of the importance of storytelling into the lives of their characters. Storytelling is one of the most ancient forms of human activity, and it brings with it certain rules and responsibilities on the part of both the storyteller and the listeners or readers. Both authors are like an actor breaking the "fourth wall" by turning and talking directly with the audience: They each break down the fiction of fiction, letting the reader see the backstage action.

But while many authors who do this are working with contemporary European-based critical models, others draw on far more established traditions in which the storyteller acts in a very self-conscious way with his or her audience. One of those authors is Thomas King, a writer who brings together his German, Greek, and Cherokee heritage to write about a number of issues concerning American Indians in the contemporary United States. Much of what he does is to ask his readers to consider the nature of storytelling.

King, in a number of his works, including Border, asks readers to be careful consumers of narratives about pan-Indianism, an identity that has been created in the post-genocidal 19th-century as the fragments of North American tribes have tried to regroup, make new connections, and survive.

What is the message that is being sent, both to members of different American Indian and First Nations communities and to members of other communities, when a story is presented as representing equally different native traditions that may in fact be radically different from each other? The mother in Border insists repeatedly on telling her own story to other characters as a way of creating and maintaining her own identity.

She refuses to let other people tell her who she is or how she could understand her own authentic sense of self. King uses literal references to the border to create questions about metaphorical border crossings. His character has lived her life balancing ideas about who she believes herself to be and how other people want to see her. This passage on p.

169 is typical of the way she continuously demands that others honor her story of her own life: "Destination?" "Salt Lake City" "Purpose of your visit" "Visit my Daughter" "Citizenship?" "Blackfoot" my mother told him "Ma'am" "Blackfoot" my mother repeated "Canadian" "Blackfoot" Even the typography here is a way of emphasizing that the mother is determined to tell her story her way. She refuses to engage in the bantering that most people perform with border guards.

She is not going to play along with them, pretending that they have the right to judge her. Rather she will judge them because they are characters in the story that she is telling about her life. King asks his readers to consider the authority of the author. For minority groups, especially those who have suffered the degree of persecution that native groups have, there are complex questions about who has the right to speak for others in the community.

Especially for authors like King, whose ancestry is so mixed (as is the case for so many American Indian and First Nations writers, artists, and activists), there is always the question of whose story precisely he is telling. Mistry, an Indian writer from Asia, takes up many of the same themes as does King, for both are the inheritors of fractured heritages, the scions of peoples who have been displaced and damaged by history.

Mistry, a member of a religious minority that has been threatened by Islam, also addresses the question of what it means to belong. "Squatter" presents a story within a story as the narrator tells two boys a pair of tales, one about a cricket player (a successful intercultural transplant) and the other an Indian man named Sarosh who cannot make himself over into a "real" Canadian after ten years in the New World.

Or rather, he has almost become a Canadian except when it comes to one of the most private acts of humanity. The boys who are the auditors in the tale-within-a-tale first encounter Sarosh in a position of being "depressed and miserable, perched on top of the toilet, crouching on his haunches, feet planted firmly for balance upon the white plastic oval of the toilet seat & #8230; having "no choice but to climb up and simulate the squat of. Indian latrines," because "no amount of exertion [while sitting] could produce success" (153).

Sarosh desperately wants to see himself as a successful immigrant, a man who.