Across A Hundred Mountains Analysis

The narrator fears the white man's ways because their world view is warped, the white men believe that they are supreme and that all other humans are made to be like them. In the narrator's eyes the white men need control and to be the master of the world around them. They force outsiders, like himself, to assimilate to their culture and to their definition of “normal.” He is uncomfortable in their brittle mold of society, he is also scared by the way that the white men treat others frightens him, and most of all he is scared that their culture has changed him.
The brittle mold of society that the white men live in frightens the narrator. He was not raised the same way that they were, it is all so foreign to him. The white men live in a society …show more content…
Because they are always dissatisfied and hungry for more they believe that others should be like that as well, “These civilized white men want us to be like them--always dissatisfied--getting a hill and wanting a mountain” (6). This mindset terrifies the narrator because it is that mentality that caused many men to become corrupt and jaded. Another thing that scares the author about the white man’s society is the way they treat their own men that simply do not fit in. They call them bums and refuse to help them get back on their feet, the narrator feels compassion and mercy towards them. The narrator knows exactly how they feel because he, too, was a cast away in the eyes of the white men. “These men… living on the outskirts of civilization are free, but pay the price of being free in civilization” …show more content…
Although he sees all of the flaws in the white man’s society he still fears that they changed his worldview and he is scared to be reunited with his family. The white men caused him to doubt his own intelligence by getting the thought, “Maybe I'm not smart enough to grasp these things that go to makeup civilization”(7), stuck in his head on replay. He does not like the doubt that has recently entered his life but he can not do anything about it because it is all he has known while he was living in the white man’s world. The biggest doubt that he has is when he questions himself on a deeper level, asking himself “‘Am I Indian, or am I White?’” (30). This question is his biggest fear of all because he knows that they changed him but he will not know how much they changed him until he goes back home and is reunited with his family, but more importantly what his father will think. “Afraid of what my father will say, afraid of being looked at as a stranger by my own people”