Lullaby

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 2002

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Literary Devices

Analepsis (Flashback)

Analepsis, or, a flashback, is key to both the structure and meaning of “Lullaby.” The story’s premise—an elderly woman reflecting on and coming to terms with her life—ensures that many key events are related in retrospect; through Ayah’s recollections, the reader learns of Jimmie’s death, the loss of Danny and Ella, and Chato’s misfortunes on the ranch. These memories typically flow from an association with something in the story’s present, as when the discomfort of the customers at Azzie’s Bar call to Ayah’s mind the “nervous” woman who brought Ella and Danny to see Ayah.

This weaving together of past and present points to the thematic significance of the story’s flashbacks: Ayah’s story is nonlinear because time itself is understood as nonlinear in Navajo tradition. Because the Navajo conceptualize time as cyclic, the lines between past, present, and future blur; the past is never really “gone,” because it will always return. In “Lullaby,” this idea manifests not only in Ayah’s memories—which are in many ways as real to her as what is happening around her at any given moment—but also in passages like this one: “[Jimmie’s] birth merged into the births of the other children and to her it became all the same birth” (44). Silko’s use of analepsis is intertwined with her depiction of time, the natural world, and human life as unified in an eternal reality.

Pathetic Fallacy

Pathetic fallacy is a form of personification that attributes human emotions to the natural world (often the weather). The clearest example of a pathetic fallacy in “Lullaby” appears in the story’s opening lines, when Silko describes the “wind and snow sing[ing] a high-pitched Yeibechei song” (43). In likening the sound of the storm to a song traditionally performed as part of a Navajo healing ritual, Silko suggests that the natural world is reflecting or even participating in the emotional journey Ayah undergoes over the course of the story. More broadly, the use of pathetic fallacy is one of the ways in which Silko underscores the interconnectedness of humans and the natural world in Navajo culture; for example, the traditional lullaby that closes the story refers to the rainbow as a loving sister and the sky as a protective father.

Synesthesia

Synesthesia is a literary device that involves blending terms and imagery associated with two or more senses (sight, hearing, etc.). In “Lullaby,” Silko uses synesthetic language to illustrate Ayah’s connection to the land on which she lives. For instance, she describes scent in terms of sound and touch: “The journey passed the days that smelled silent and dry like the caves above the canyon with yellow painted buffaloes on their walls” (50). The use of synesthesia reinforces the idea of the story itself as a “lullaby”—that is, a work that blends the visual medium of the printed word with the auditory medium of song. In this sense, synesthesia is central to Silko’s project of evoking the oral traditions of many Native American cultures in the written word.

Repetition

The most straightforward examples of repetition in the story come in the closing lullaby, which repeats words like “sleep,” phrases like “[w]e are together always,” and sentence constructions like “The earth is your mother, / she holds you,” “The sky is your father, / he protects you,” (51). This kind of repetition is common in songs, particularly those that are intended to have a soothing effect.

The short story mimics the structure of a lullaby by repeating not only words, but also images and scenes. The lullaby itself is an example of repetition; it recalls Ayah’s description of the singing wind in the story’s opening paragraph. Other instances of repetition include the descriptions of Ayah smiling at the snow covering first her and Chato’s shoes, the descriptions of Ayah finding comfort in the sky, and the descriptions of both the Army official and the doctors wearing khaki. These moments and others like them create a cyclical feeling to the narrative as a whole, and echoes the Navajo understanding of time as nonlinear.