Through the techniques of defamiliarization, deconstruction, and recontextualization, King blurs the borders between history/ reality and myth/ magic, questioning the historicity of the frontier myth and the origins of North American civilisation.

He moves from the contemporary to the historical, just as he moves from the historical to the ahistorical, projecting us back to the places of Amerindian or Judeo-Christian mythology. I will then go on to examine the settings, which King constantly alternates, moving the reader from the contemporary world of Natives living on reserves to those living off. These narrators oscillate between the stance of omniscient narrator and that of external storyteller they are partly character, partly storyteller.

This paper will first of all focus on King’s multiple narrators, the numerous I's that range from intradiegetic narrators of questionable competence to extradiegetic narrators straddled between internal and external focalisation. Although his work often reflects the realities of a certain ethnocultural community, that of status and non-status Indians in Canada and the United States, it nevertheless goes beyond the realm of the sociological or anthropological, simultaneously foregrounding the role of formal codes and conventions in storytelling 1.

1 For a survey of the larger body of Native literature to which King’s work belongs, a literature 'r (.)ġThe short story collection One Good Story, That One was published in 1993 by native writer Thomas King, whose imaginative and playful works are grounded not in print culture but in the strong oral tradition of native culture.

Sa production littéraire, fondée sur la dialectique et le syncrétisme ludiques, crée un nouvel espace social et littéraire. King estompe les frontières entre l'histoire/la réalité et le mythe/la magie mettant en question l'historicité du mythe de la frontière et les origines de la civilisation nord-américaine. Par le biais de la défamiliarisation, de la déconstruction et de la recontextualisation, T. King les situe tantôt dans le monde contemporain des autochtones qui vivent soit à l'intérieur soit à l'extérieur des réserves, tantôt dans les lieux anhistoriques de la mythologie amérindienne ou judéo-chrétienne. Cette étude examinera le recueil de nouvelles intitulé One Good Story, That One de l'auteur amérindien Thomas King, en particulier sa technique, qui consiste a alterner des narrateurs homodiégétiques d'une compétence douteuse avec des narrateurs hétérodiégétiques suspendus entre une focalisation interne et externe, entre la position de narrateur omniscient et celle d'observateur extérieur, mi-personnage, mi-raconteur.

The one about coyote going west