Lullaby

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).