As Black Elk Speaks is not a novel, it may not seem to illustrate themes in the traditional literary sense. As a narrative shaped around the life of an extraordinary person living in extraordinary times, however, it raises significant universal issues and explores central ideas that can be traced throughout the book. The following essays examine some of those thematic ideas as well as a unique textual problem posed by the circumstances of the book's publication.
The story of someone who undergoes great tests of character to become the embodiment of the values of his or her society is a familiar one. Such stories are the stuff of myths, legends, fairytales, and folktales. The most familiar plot structure for these stories is the journey: The hero sets off on an actual journey, encountering danger and intrigue, adventures that form him or her into the person that he or she is meant to be; the story of Odysseus in Homer's Odyssey follows such a plotline. Frequently, the journey is a quest, a search for a significant object that the hero must bring back to the community, as is the case with the Arthurian legends that depict the search for the Holy Grail; sometimes the hero must find and destroy an enemy of the community, as Beowulf does in killing Grendel. In the process of the literal quest, the hero develops those qualities that his or her society most values, becoming a model for the society by the time he or she returns home. In a psychoanalytical view of literature, these stories are interpreted as reflective of a psychological or spiritual process, as symbolic of any person's psychological and/or spiritual quest for the mature integration of personality and the full development of character.
