What is the author's style in Yellow Woman by Leslie Marmon Silko?

"Yellow Woman" is narrated in the first person by a young woman who remains unnamed throughout the story. First-person points of view limit the narrative to only what the narrator perceives. In "Yellow Woman," the entire narrative is filtered through the narrator's experiences, expectations and prior knowledge. In this instance, the first-person narrative contributes to the story's ambiguity, as the narrator has difficulty distinguishing whether her experience takes place in "real time" or in mythic time.

"Yellow Woman" is a self-reflexive story, meaning that the narrative refers to the process of composing the story itself. In "Yellow Woman," the narrator explicitly refers to the Yellow Woman story that her grandfather used to tell. She wonders if the original Yellow Woman knew that she was a character in a story. During her adventure with Silva, she repeatedly wonders if she has become the original Yellow Woman, or if she is reliving an episode similar to that actually experienced by a Laguna woman in "time immemorial" and will herself be the subject of a later tale.