As with your previous posts, I want you to feel free to respond a specific passage from There, There that strikes you. Equally, I invite you to help me think through an image that has caught my attention. In my own reading, I have been reflecting on some of the interrelated issues raised in the last prompt – the role of storytelling, the negotiation of a Native identity – in light of one of the novel’s recurring symbols: the spider. When Orvil leaves Opal a message about pulling three spider legs out of his leg, for example, this leads Opal to reflect that her own mother had “said spiders carry miles of web in their bodies, miles of story, miles of potential home and trap.” (163). When I first read this sentence, I half-expected it to resolve into “clean,” clear metaphors: web-weaving equals storytelling; discovering a spider in oneself equals discovering one’s own identity. Orange complicates this, though. He implies that the “web” of stories can be alternately – or simultaneously – both “home and trap.” Several pages later, Opal similarly reminds us that the Cheyenne name, “Veho,” means “spider and trickster and white man” (169). In a novel that refers to “spider” some twenty-eight separate times – and, indeed, sometimes embeds the spider image in or on its characters’ bodies – what are we to make of its meaning? Does the figure and function of the “trickster” help us understand Opal’s link between “home and trap?” To return to last session’s questions, how does Orange’s use of the spider-figure provide us a way for think about the difficulties and contradictions involved in negotiating identities? In finding meaning in our lives through storytelling?