ORAL CULTURE IN THE NOVEL CEREMONY BY LESLIE MARMON SILKO

American settlers or Native Americans are the names of the people, who had been living in the North America during the arrival of the first European colonizers, and their descendants. Given the fact that there were more than two thousand settlers and that they lived in a huge territory, their life-style and the customs cannot be generalized. However, what is in common to all the indigenous people is the oral transmission, since they did not know for a written word. Traditional Laguna stories and myths become an original thematic, structural and narrative material in the novel Ceremony written by Leslie Marmon Silko. The novel is published in 1977 and stands among the world’s most precious works of the contemporary Native American prose. The aim of this paper is to describe characteristics of the oral literature which apply to indigenous people. Among those characteristics are: the importance of oral transmission for community’s survival, its cyclic structure, non-linear comprehension of time, the importance of a narrator and a listener in narration and the connection between oral transmission and the nature. The special attention will be given to the oral transmission of Laguna Pueblo people, to whom belongs the contemporary writer Leslie Marmon Silko.