Mary Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative Analysis

Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative is made up of a hue of different voices that she uses to portray separate messages about what’s happening, what she thinks about it, and how she feels. Therefore, her captivity narrative has a varying effect on different readers. For instance, some readers may believe that Rowlandson has a very cohesive thought process throughout the whole of her captivity, because she uses these varying voices to prove one overarching theme to the reader: God provided the circumstances which gave her the ability to survive the captivity. However, other readers see several contradictions or discrepancies in the way she writes, because of the different voices she uses. For example, Rowlandson leads the reader in one direction for a passage, then she flips her writing to reflect the opposite idea. An example of one of these contradictions is that she has witnessed multiple Indians be kind and offer her food and supplies, but she believes that it is God providing for her and not the Indians themselves.
Rowlandson has the reader believing that the Indians are good at some points and evil at others, but she never completely gives the Indians a human voice. For instance, she starts with calling the Indians, “those barbarous creatures” (259), but a few removes into the narrative she reverts to calling her captors, “them” or …show more content…
This act isn’t cohesive with her many passages about saving her own family, or the English people in general. In fact, she even states immediately after this passage, “Thus the Lord made that pleasant refreshing, which another time would have been an abomination” (277). Rowlandson knows that what she did was wrong, but she supposed it necessary and doesn’t consider the action as barbaric as she would if she had witnessed an Indian taking food from an English