“Lullaby” is a story recounted largely in retrospect, and Silko establishes the significance of memory at the start of the short story: “[Ayah] was an old woman now, and her life had become memories” (43). This is a bittersweet statement: Ayah’s life consists of “memories” both because there is relatively little of it left before her and because she has lost so much of what once gave her life meaning, including both her children and the hope of seeing her culture live on in her descendants. On the other hand, Ayah’s memories are so vivid that they constitute a kind of “life” in and of themselves, often eclipsing the reality of her actual surroundings. For example, when Ayah recalls the way in which both her mother’s weaving and her buckskin shoes protect her from the cold and damp, she finds that “Jimmie’s blanket seem[s] warmer than it had ever been” (44) as if the blanket itself has been transformed into the blankets Ayah’s mother used to make.

Memory plays a significant role in Navajo culture. For the Navajo, whose history has traditionally been preserved in oral form, memory is not a passive experience; memory engages the person doing the remembering in an act of reconstructing history and transmitting it to future generations.