SOURCE: "Christian Indians: Samson Occom and William Apess, " in Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing, and Representation in North American Indian Texts, Pinter Publishers, 1991, pp. 49-64.

Murray is a British educator and critic who specializes in American Studies. Below, he analyzes the rhetorical strategies Apess employed in his major works.

[Apes's autobiography A Son of the Forest] conforms to the overall pattern of the conversion narrative in which, after many lapses and tribulations, he is rescued from rum and degradation by Christianity, but in telling his story he has another agenda as well, a criticism of white attitudes, carried out in a whole series of digressions. From one of these digressions (which he himself marks as such by the regular use of 'but to return—') we realise that the full title of the book, A Son of the Forest; the Experience of William Apes, a Native of the Forest...