The truth is always made up of little particulars which sound ridiculous when repeated.

I am without a doubt certain that this book has a deeply flawed and problematic nature to it. It’s a book about a white boy who goes to live with the Cheyenne after his family has been killed. He grows up among them, he learns from them, adopts their culture, customs, and language, proves himself enough to earn the name “Little Big Man” and then also finds himself repeatedly separated from and reunited with them.

So it’s already rife with potentially problems. The issue for me though, is that it’s just SO good as a novel, as a piece of writing, and as a clear, conscientious voice that it’s not easy to place.

So some things that complicate the matter. Jack Crabb is not captured by the Cheyenne, a literary trope that goes back at least to the 1500s in American literature (a historical occurrence that has been repeatedly exploited in literature). Instead, he follows them and begs to be adopted by them until they finally relent and begrudgingly do so. This opens up the opportunity for his white consciousness to be forever split in two both within and without the Cheyenne. He doesn’t “go native” as the racist trope would have it; he sort of creates a hybrid space within himself and he finds that hybridity constantly at war with itself.

He’s also not a “white savior” character. He knows he’s not saving anybody from anything. He’s also not really a picaresque either. Instead, he’s a thoughtful, contradictory, and complex narrator. His story is not satire, but myth-making. He’s 111 (maybe) at the beginning, and his failing memory and fading past, along with the giant changes in American life he faced in his life and in the American way of life have caused him to conflate, fabricate, and mix up a lot of the different things that go on. He IS a kind of Huck Finn character, but he’s not country-wise like Huck, he’s earnestly intelligent and uniquely positioned.

(Photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Big_Man_(novel))