Undermining Narrative Stereotypes in Simon Ortiz's "The Killing of a State Cop"

Abstract

In an insightful article, Lawrence J. Evers has examined how Leslie Marmon Silko's Story and Simon Ortiz's The Killing of a State Cop retell and give Pueblo cultural form to the yellow-journalistic, legal, and psychiatric tellings of the murder of the new Mexico State Trooper, Nash Garcia, which took place on the Acoma reservation on Good Friday, 1952. Evers finds that Silko's text, in providing as a motive for the murder Tony's conviction that the cop is a witch, bears an eerie likeness to the report by Dr. George Devereux, an anthropologist and psychiatrist whose medical evaluation of Willie and Gabriel Felipe influenced Federal Judge Carl Hatch to reduce the brothers' sentence from death to life imprisonment. Devereux concluded that the brothers' behavior was abnormal by both Acoma and Anglo-American cultural standards, and that Willie was insane and Gabriel psychotic at the time of the murder. Remarking that Ortiz's experience with the event was more immediate than Silko's, that his narrative is closer to the facts of the case, and that the narrative detail of the killing is close in tone to the gruesome journalistic account, Evers contends that the similarity between the anonymous second narrator and Ortiz provides a point of view that mitigates the reader's response to the crime (257). I agree with this judgment and would like to examine in some detail how Ortiz's story gives the reader an option other