storytelling

• The Round House features many stories-within-stories: references to mythology, to novels, and to television, as well as factual and fictional stories told second- or third-hand. These stories affect people in multiple ways, but most importantly, they provide their listeners with behavioral and emotional models to teach them how to act in difficult situations and how to talk about their lives.
• As story consumption becomes insufficient to help people cope with their most painful experiences, some characters find catharsis by transitioning from story listener to story teller.
• throughout the book, the reader sees how storytellers and listeners mutually benefit from the storytelling process, healing and learning from each other at the same time.
• Stories provide various behavioral and emotional models to characters throughout the book, who then explore and (hopefully) connect with them. 
•  Sometimes these old stories provide morals intended to help prevent people from making the same mistakes, as when Mooshum tells Joe the story of Mirage trying to use wiindigoo justice incorrectly to kill Akii. Mooshum’s stories also obviously play a pivotal role providing a behavioral model by teaching Joe about wiindigoo justice and structuring how he thinks about his choice to kill Linden. Without Mooshum’s story, Joe likely would have thought about the possibility of killing Linden through different moral understandings, and he might not have killed Linden at all.