Perhaps the most fascinating way to analyze The Way to Rainy Mountain would be to interpret it as a theodicy and a commentary on culture and religion. For the latter purposes, the writer includes the fact that his grandmother later in her life converted to Christianity, but he never detected any difference in her behavior, meaning that Christianity was compatible with her cultural history, at least for her. Therefore, the brutality and vile of the white men who killed the Kiowa history is completely unjustified and tragic and sad.
Therefore, Momaday asks himself about life and death. He decides to take the issue up the same way his ancestors before him did. He decides to take the sacred pilgrimage himself, and he suddenly aligns himself with the religious relationship between Native American folklore and nature itself.
No doubt, he wonders why such a terrible fate should come to a culture so beautiful and sacred. But, that's not the worst of things for him now. Now the past is what it is, but now also his grandmother has died. He must mourn her and try to reckon with life why good things must end. In this way, the novel confronts the transcendental issues of death anxiety and the issue of human suffering and tragedy.
