Ceremony

BY:Leslie Marmon Silko

Context

Born on March five, 1948 in Albuquerque, new Mexico and of mixed Laguna Pueblo, white, and Mexican ancestry, Leslie Marmon Silko grew up on a Laguna Pueblo reservation. She attended Bureau of Indian Affairs Schools, and then the University of New Mexico. After a brief stint at law school, she pursued graduate studies in English, and embarked the writing career that has led her to be considered the premier Native American novelist and poet of her generation. Silko has lived and taught English in New Mexico, Alaska, and Arizona.

Silko's first book was the poetry collection Laguna Woman, in 1974, followed by Ceremony, in 1977. The first novel by a Native American women to be published in the United States, Ceremony received immediate critical and popular acclaim. Since Ceremony, Silko has published numerous books, including: Storyteller (1981) which combines poetry, tribal stories, fiction, and photographs; a collection of selected correspondence with nature poet James Wright, The Delicacy and Strength of Lace (1985); the novel Almanac of the Dead (1991); Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit (1996), a collection of essays on Native American life; and the novel Gardens in the Dunes (1999).

While one Native American author, D'Arcy McNickle, published several novels in the 1930s, it was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s, with N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, and then Silko's work, that Native American authors became a significant presence in the American literary scene. During this same time, works by and about a range of "ethnic" or multicultural American authors began to gain access to publication and attention across the country. This was due in large part to the increased contact between communities instigated by the demographic shifts caused by World War II, and to the Harlem Renaissance and then the equal rights movements of the 1960s.

Ceremony is set on the same Laguna Pueblo reservation where Silko grew up. Pueblo Indians refers to the group of Native Americans, including Hopi, Zuni, and Laguna, from the Pueblo crescent, which runs from central new Mexico through northeastern Arizona. The Laguna Reservation lies between Albuquerque and Los Alamos, New Mexico. The Pueblos first came into contact with whites in the 16th century when the Spanish settled in the area. Pueblo territory became a part of Mexico in the early 1800s, when Mexico gained independence from Spain. The United States took control of the region after the Mexican-American war, with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. The United States government introduced the Reservation system, originally intended to maintain racial segregation, and established the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which instituted, among other things, government-run schools for Native American children.

All of Silko's work draws on her personal experience as a Native American. As she often points out in interviews, Native American culture is passed on through a profoundly communal process of storytelling. Silko bases her work on traditional Native American stories, using narrative techniques that emphasize their communal aspects, even in books authored by one woman. The oral nature of traditional Native American storytelling ensures that each version will be slightly changed, and updated. In this spirit, she affirms in interviews, Silko's works are a continuation, not a reinterpretation, of the traditional stories. Ceremony features the three most important figures in Pueblo mythology, Thought Woman, Corn Mother, and Sun Father both in their traditional stories and in updated versions. Tayo, the main character in Ceremony, is also a figure in traditional Laguna stories. All of Silko's works demonstrate her concern with the preservation of Native American culture, including traditions, languages, and natural resources, in combination with an awareness of the reality of cultural miscegenation .

Plot Overview

Returning home to the Laguna Pueblo reservation from World War II, via a Veteran's Hospital, Tayo must find a way to cure himself of his mental anguish, and to bring the rain back to his community. Combining prose and poetry, Ceremony interweaves the individual story of Tayo and the collective story of his people. As Tayo's journey unfolds, it is paralleled by poems telling old stories.

The trauma of thinking he saw his uncle Josiah's face among a crowd of Japanese soldiers he was ordered to shoot, and then of watching his cousin Rocky die, drove Tayo out of his mind. A period of time in a Veterans' Hospital gets him well enough to return to his home, with his Grandmother, his Auntie, and her husband Robert. This is the family unit that raised him after his mother, who had conceived him with an unknown white man, left him for good at the age of four. In his family's home Tayo faces not only their disappointment at the loss of Rocky, but also his continued grieving over his favorite uncle Josiah's death. He also contends with his guilt over a prayer against the rain he uttered in the forests of the Philippines, which he thinks is responsible for the six-year drought on the reservation.

As he slowly recuperates, Tayo realizes that he is not alone. His childhood friends Harley, Leroy, Emo, and Pinkie who also fought in the war contend with similar post-traumatic stress, self-medicating with alcohol. The company is little comfort. His old friends spend their drunken hours reminiscing about how great the war was and how much respect they got while they were in uniform. These stories only make Tayo think about the tremendous discrimination the Native Americans face at the hands of the whites, whom they nonetheless seem to admire, and he is even more saddened and infuriated. Just as Tayo begins to give up hope and to wish he could return to the VA hospital, his grandmother calls in the medicine man, Ku'oosh. Ku'oosh performs for Tayo a ceremony for warriors who have killed in battle, but both Ku'oosh and Tayo fear that the ancient ceremonies are not applicable to this new situation.

Tayo is helped but not cured by Ku'oosh's ceremony. It prompts him to consider his childhood, especially the summer before he left for the army. Although Auntie did her best to keep the two boys separate, Tayo and Rocky became close friends, and the summer after they graduated from high school, they enlisted in the army together. That summer, Josiah fell in love with Night Swan, a Mexican woman who lived just outside the reservation. At her urging, he invested in a herd of Mexican cattle, which Tayo helped him to care for. As so often happens, there is a drought that summer. Having heard the old stories of how droughts are ended, Tayo goes to a spring and invents a rain ceremony. The following day it rains. In addition to helping the crops and the cattle, the rain keeps Josiah from visiting Night Swan. He asks Tayo to bring her a note. Tayo delivers the note, and in the process is seduced by Night Swan.

Realizing that his ceremony has not been enough for Tayo, Ku'oosh sends him to the nearby town of Gallup to see another medicine man, Betonie, who knows more about the problems incurred by the contact between Native American and white cultures. Although he is skeptical of Betonie's strange ways and especially high connection with the white world, Tayo tells him of his what is troubling him. Betonie listens and explains that they must invent and complete a new ceremony. Tayo accepts. Betonie tells Tayo stores of the old ceremonies as he performs them. Then Betonie tells Tayo stories of his grandfather, Descheeny, and the beginning of the creation of a new ceremony to stop the destruction the whites, an invention of Native American witchery, are wreaking on the world.

Betonie sends Tayo back home, reminding him that the ceremony is still far from complete. When he meets Harley and Leroy on the way home, Tayo slips back into their lifestyle for a moment, but soon moves on, heeding the signs Betonie told him of as he searches for Josiah's cattle. Tayo follows the stars to a woman's house. After spending a night with the woman, Ts'eh, Tayo heads up into the mountains. He finds Josiah's cattle fenced into a white man's pasture. While Tayo breaks into the pasture, the cattle run off to its far reaches, and Tayo spends all night looking for them. As dawn approaches, Tayo is about to give up when a mountain lion comes up to him. Tayo honors the mountain lion, and follows its tracks to the cattle. Just as he herds the cattle out of the pasture, two white patrolmen find Tayo. Not realizing that the cattle are missing, but knowing Tayo has trespassed, the patrolmen arrest Tayo. Before they can bring him to town, however, they notice the mountain lion tracks and let Tayo go in order to hunt it. As Tayo heads out, it begins to snow. Tayo knows this will cover the tracks of his cattle and of the mountain lion, making the patrolmens' efforts fruitless. On the way down the mountain, Tayo meets a hunter, who lives with Ts'eh. When they arrive back at her house, she has corralled Tayo's cattle, which she keeps until Tayo and Robert return with a cattle truck to gather them up.

Returning home with Josiah's cattle, Tayo feels cured. However, the drought persists, and Tayo knows the ceremony is not complete. He goes to the family's ranch with the cattle, where he finds Ts'eh . They spend the summer together, but as it draws to an end Robert visits and warns Tayo that Emo has been spreading rumors about him. Shortly thereafter, Ts'eh tells Tayo that Emo and the white police are coming after him. Before she leaves, she tells Tayo how to avoid capture.

Following Ts'eh's instructions, Tayo easily evades the white police. Still running from Emo, he meets Harley and Leroy. Almost too late, Tayo realizes that Harley and Leroy have joined forces with Emo. Running again, Tayo finds himself in an abandoned uranium mine. As he looks at the gaping hole left in the earth, Tayo realizes that this is the last station of his ceremony, the one where he incorporates an element of white culture, the mine. All he has to do is to spend the night there and the ceremony will be complete. Soon Emo and Pinkie arrive. From a hiding place, Tayo must watch them torture Harley to death, and restrain himself from killing Emo in order to save Harley. With the help of the wind, Tayo survives the night. He returns home and goes back to Ku'oosh. After hearing all about Tayo's ceremony, Ku'oosh pronounces that Ts'eh was in fact A'moo'ooh, who has given her blessings to Tayo and his ceremony; the drought is ended and the destruction of the whites is stopped. Tayo spends one last night in Ku'oosh's house to finish off the ceremony, and then he returns home.

Analysis of Major Characters

Tayo

Tayo embodies the confluence of Native American and white cultures, both present in his ancestry, and in his experience, which brings him from the reservation, to the US army, to the Philippines, to a Veteran's Hospital, and back to the reservation. Carrying the signs of the cultural mixing in his green eyes often makes Tayo bear the brunt of a whole society's confusion at the ways in which the world is changing. Especially since he never knew his father and was abandoned by his mother at the age of four, Tayo encounters great difficulty in negotiating his mixed identity and experience. This is exacerbated by his Auntie who raises him with the constant reminder of his difference. Like most of his peers, Tayo is educated in white-run schools. Unlike his friends, however, he often finds the white ways of life faulty and continues to respect and to believe in the Native American traditions he learns from his family as well. Tayo is prepared to serve as a bridge between the older and younger generations of Native Americans.

World War II interrupts Tayo's life, as it does to most Americans of his generation. He comes of age on the battlefield, amidst tremendous death and destruction. His awareness of the connections among of all people and all things makes it incredibly difficult for Tayo to kill in a war he does not understand, in a place far from his home. The majority of the Native American men who return from World War II drown their trauma in alcohol, full of confused anger. Tayo, however, is more sad than angry. Painfully aware of the ways in which Native Americans were and are mistreated by whites, Tayo is not interested in glorifying his time in the army. These characteristics allow him to respond to the help the medicine men Ku'oosh and Betonie offer.

His lifelong desperation to belong in his family and his community, along with his deep-seated belief in the power of the old traditions, allow Tayo to take up the challenge offered by Betonie and to undertake the completion of the ceremony, which can cure both himself and his people. Although he often falters along the path, Tayo's acceptance of the Native American mythical world allows him to benefit from the aid of accidents, animals, spirits, and the elements.


Betonie

As a medicine man, Betonie bridges the real and the mythical worlds. As would be expected, he spends much of his time in communication with spirits and stories to which others do not have access. The story of his own childhood appears magical, as he is descended from a woman who one day appears hanging in a treetop and turned out to be in search of her husband. In these ways, Betonie is like the other medicine man in the story, Ku'oosh. However, Betonie is also shockingly connected with the mundane details not only of Native American society but also that of whites.

Betonie attended a white-run boarding school and keeps old gas station calendars among his sacred herbs and stones. He lives not at the sacred center of the reservation, but on a cliff overlooking a run-down white town. He is descended from generations of Laguna medicine men and women only on one side; the other part of his ancestry is Mexican. He is a kindred spirit to Tayo, standing at the brink of a culture clash. But while Tayo tries desperately to make sense of the world, Betonie was raised with a deep understanding of it, and a profound tolerance for it. Where Tayo cries, Betonie laughs.

While Betonie is wise, he is not omnipotent (all-powerful). Medicine men are vehicles rather than agents; they observe, remember, and advise, but they need patients through whom to perform their ceremonies. Betonie provides Tayo with the tools and the faith Tayo needs in order to complete the ceremony. Betonie's role is that of the teacher, rather than of the hero.


Auntie

Although Ceremony is clearly a Native American novel about the adverse effects white people have on Native American culture and on the world in general, the Native Americans in the story are not idealized, nor are they wholly positive characters. Along with Emo, Auntie is one of the most negative characters in the book. In addition to embracing some of the more destructive elements of white society, Auntie also adheres to Native American tradition in a destructive manner.

The eldest daughter of Grandma, Auntie, whose given name is Thelma, will be the next matriarch of her family. As such, she feels responsible to the community for her family and especially her younger siblings. However, Auntie is more concerned about how Laura and Josiah's actions will affect the respect the community gives to her family and what gossip they may cause to be spread, than she is with their welfare. Similarly, she follows the letter rather than the spirit of Native American traditions, leading her to condemn completely any relationship outside of the community. In addition to this blind adherence to Native American social mores, Auntie is a devout Christian who thrives on a narrow interpretation of the concept of martyrdom. In Auntie's understanding of martyrdom, she will gain the respect of her peers if she is seen to suffer for the sins of others. It is in this spirit that she raises Tayo, rather than out of any love for him or any sense of the Native American concept of family, which is not limited to nuclear (mother, father, and child) units.

Although Auntie is a highly problematic character who causes all sorts of unnecessary problems in Tayo's life, she is not demonized. Although she does not do it out of love, she does raise Tayo. She causes difficulty, but not ruin. Her mistreatment of Tayo is attenuated by the rest of her family. Auntie's misunderstanding of both Native American and Christian traditions is the result of the same clashing of cultures that affects everyone in the novel.

Themes, Motifs & Symbols

Themes

The Importance of Storytelling

Storytelling in the context of Ceremony refers not only to the general process of telling a story but also to the particular Native American tradition of storytelling. Traditionally, Native American cultural is oral, and everything from biology to history to morality to medicine is passed on in the form of stories. While the elders in a community may be the official storytellers, storytelling is a profoundly communal event. Since stories are intended to pass on information that will be remembered, they are often rhythmic, almost sung, and contain a large amount of repetition. This mode of storytelling is presented in Ceremony in the form of poems, both framing the main narrative (at the beginning and end) and interspersed throughout. These stories are in fact traditional Pueblo stories, known outside of the context of the novel. Tayo's tale reflects the traditional stories but is original. Along with the arrangement of the prose and poem passages, it can be seen as Silko's personal intervention in the communal process of storytelling.

While the prose sections of Ceremony are primarily narrated in a third person limited voice, the poems vary between first and third person. They announce the elements of this theme that will recur throughout the novel. Stories have the power to heal: they contain the rituals and ceremonies that can cure individuals and communities. They do this primarily by reminding us of the interrelations between all people and all things. As a story is told communally or is shared by one person with another, it creates a sense of community between those people. The presence of both the first and third person in the poems reinforces this aspect. For Tayo, the stories represent the Native American understanding of the world that he grew up with but that the white schools, the army, and the doctors and the VA hospital tried to convince him were incorrect. As he remembers and reenacts the old stories, Tayo reconnects with his community, recovers from the trauma of the war, and returns the rain to his land. The stories teach Tayo that he is not alone, both because he shares stories with a whole community and also because content of the ancient stories remind him that others before him have had similar experiences—he is not alone, and there is always hope for renewal.

The Destructiveness of Contact Between Cultures

The contact between Native American and white cultures in Ceremony is largely destructive. While the novel presents its devastating effects in somber terms, it is not concerned with simply lamenting the fact that whites arrived on the American continent and established systems that prove fatal to the indigenous peoples. Rather, Ceremony presents an attempt to contend with the reality of a mixed cultural landscape in a way that allows Native American culture to persist, even as it changes. Tayo himself embodies the contact between Native American and white cultures, as he bears his mixed racial heritage in his green eyes. Tayo must learn to make use of the white parts of himself and of the world around him, without abandoning his primary allegiance to Native American traditions.

For many in the novel, the first contact between the cultures takes place in the white schools that the Native Americans attend. There, white teachers tell them that their stories are not true and that their understanding of the world is not valid. Most significant, the white teachers present a completely different view of science and nature, and, as a result, the younger generations of Native Americans want to abandon traditional farming practices. This creates an agricultural crisis that is exacerbated by the pollution of reservation lands by white mines and military industry. In addition, white towns attract Native Americans with the prospect of white-collar jobs and good pay, but racism denies Native Americans access to those positions, while the cash they are able to make allows them greater access to the bars and the alcoholism whites have also introduced. All of these serve as strong indictments of the effect of whites on Native American culture. However, the relationship between white and Native American cultures is completely shifted in Ceremony when Betonie reveals that whites are an invention of Native American witchcraft. In the revelation, although they are still a primarily destructive force, whites are shown to be a part of Native American culture and traditions.

The Necessity of Tradition

In Ceremony, preserving tradition is essential to saving the Native American community. Both for Tayo and in the ancient stories, forgetting tradition brings massive drought and disaster. A key role of the medicine men is to preserve tradition, as is symbolized by the crates of artifacts they store. However, in order for tradition to survive, it must change with the times. The reservation medicine man, Ku'oosh, is unable to cure Tayo because he knows only the traditional healing ceremonies, which are not applicable to contemporary illnesses. As Betonie explains, traditions must be constantly reinvented to reflect the ever-changing reality of the world. Similarly, the novel shows the dangers of blindly adhering to traditions rather than trying to follow their intent. Auntie represents those who simply follow the dictates of traditions, as she mistrusts any form of interracial relationship. Josiah, on the other hand, represents those who follow the spirit of traditions, such as when he finds a way to interbreed Mexican and Hereford cattle to create a herd that will be both hardy and productive.

The Constant Threat of Drought

Water is essential to the survival of crops and animals for the Laguna, whose primary occupation is agriculture. Without city-sponsored plumbing and irrigation systems, and not wanting to interrupt the natural flow of water with dams, the Laguna are completely dependent on natural rainfall. Living in the desert land that comprises much of the southwest of the United States, the Laguna are constantly threatened by drought. Many of the traditional stories and ceremonies revolve around ensuring adequate rainfall. The primary signal of the spirits' displeasure with something the people has done is a drought, and one of the greatest feats of a destructive spirit is the creation of a drought. However, as Josiah tells Tayo when he is a child, everything has both its good and its bad sides. While too little rainfall can be disastrous, so can too much, as Tayo learns in the Philippine jungle. Tayo commits a grievous error when he forgets this lesson and, in the midst of a flood, curses the rain. Whether or not Tayo's curse is actually responsible for the drought on the reservation, it is essential for his health as well as for that of his community that he learn through his ceremony to respect the patterns of nature. Once he does that, the rain returns.

Motifs

Nonlinear Narrative Structure

The Native Americans of the Pueblo see time as cyclical rather than linear. Silko produces a text that emphasizes this notion by using a nonlinear narrative structure. In most of Western literature, narrative proceeds in a temporal succession from beginning to end and from earlier to later. Although features such as analepsis (shifting back in time) and prolepsis (shifting forward in time) are standard, they are generally clearly marked and take up much less of the time and space of the novel than does the primary narrative. In Ceremony, on the other hand, it is often difficult to distinguish between primary and secondary narratives, or between past and present. Silko switches back and forth from Tayo's childhood to his time in the Philippines to various moments after his return, following no order except the order of thematic connections between the different events. The entire novel is narrated in the past tense, so whether an event actually occurred before Tayo's birth or in the midst of the ceremony, it appears to happen at the same time. The effect of this is to recreate a Pueblo sense of time, where all things are cyclic and where their immediacy is related not to how long ago they happened but to how important they feel in the present.

The Combination of Poetry and Prose

Silko's use of poetry invokes the rhythmic, communal storytelling patterns of the Native Americans, while her use of prose belongs to a Western narrative tradition. By combining the two in her novel, Silko asserts that the form as well as the content of the story is about the blending of the two cultures. Thematically, white and Native American cultures clash with each other more often than they complement each other, but the prose and poetry weave together easily. In many ways, they tell the same story; “only thing is,” as Grandma says at the end, “the names sound different.” The entire stories sound different as well, as versification (the division of the verses), rhyming, alliteration (the repetition of the first letter of a word), and repetition give the poems a distinctive rhythm. The poem at the end of the novel completes the line on the page before the first prose section, enclosing the entire novel within a poem. In other words, just as whites are said to be an invention of Native American witchcraft, so is a Western form of storytelling shown to be contained within a Native American form of storytelling.

Symbols

The Gallup Ceremonial

Every year, the white mayor and council of Gallup organize a Ceremonial. The Gallup Ceremonial symbolizes the ways in which whites misunderstand Native American tradition and appropriate it for their own purposes. Dancers from a wide range of Native American groups are invited the Gallup Ceremonial and are paid for their performances. This demonstrates the whites' lack of comprehension of the differences between Native American tribes, as well as their ignorance of the specific purpose of each individual ceremony. Whereas traditional ceremonies are performed around important events or times of year, with a specific ritual meaning, the Gallup Ceremonial is intended purely for the entertainment of whites. In addition, for the rest of the year, the town of Gallup at best ignores and at worst promotes the racist mistreatment of Native Americans, symbolizing the ways in which whites are eager to praise Native American artifacts but do not want to deal with the ongoing lives of real Native Americans.

Section 1 of ceremony

Summary

A series of three poems open Ceremony. The first poem tells of Ts'its'tsi'nako, thought-woman, the spider, who created the world with her sisters by thinking and naming things. The poem ends with the lines:

"I'm telling you the story she is thinking."

The second poem is entitled "Ceremony" and focuses on the power of stories, which contain, among other things, rituals and ceremony. The third poem, "What she said" simply reads:

"The only cure I know is a good ceremony, that's what she said."

The poems are followed by a blank page with the word "sunrise," after which the narrative begins.

Tayo tosses and turns, slipping between dreams of his home where Laguna and Mexican Spanish are spoken and dreams of his time during World War II in the Philippines, where he is surrounded by the sounds of Japanese. Waking, Tayo thinks about how confused his memories and dreams are. The only way for him to relax is to hold an image of a deer in his mind, but his mind quickly wanders to the Philippines, where in the humid climate, he thought he saw his uncle Josiah among a group of Japanese soldiers he was ordered to shoot. Even when his cousin Rocky turned over the dead bodies of the Japanese soldiers and reasoned the impossibility of the image with him, Tayo was sure his uncle was among the dead.

Tayo gets up and milks his goats. He sits in his kitchen, missing Josiah. There is a severe drought, similar to the one after World War I, in the 1920s. During the last drought, Tayo was a young boy and helped his uncle to carry water for the animals. Now he has few animals and no family. Tayo was gone for six years. He remembers the rain of the jungle in the Philippines. He and a corporal carried Rocky, with a gangrene-infested wound, on a sheet until anenormous flood tore the sheet from their hands and nearly killed them. Then, Tayo prayed against the rain, with a poem about drought. Tayo believes that the six years of drought are the result of his prayer to stop the rain.

In the Veterans' Hospital in Los Angeles where he went after the war, Tayo felt like white smoke: invisible, unconscious, unable to communicate. At first, Tayo can only speak of himself in the third person. He cries so much he makes himself vomit, but he slowly gets well enough to be released from the hospital. At the Los Angeles train depot, Tayo collapses. Awakening to the sounds and sights of a Japanese family, he thinks he is back in the Philippines. A depot man helps him up, explaining that Japanese-Americans are no longer held in internment camps. Tayo vomits again.

On the reservation, Tayo remembers his childhood with Rocky. He thinks about the Indian stories from his childhood which, despite his teachers having told him they were nonsense, he still believes.

Tayo's friend Harley stops by on an old ornery burro (mule) to visit. Harley was also a soldier, at Wake Island, and came back with a Purple Heart. The only change Tayo notices in Harley is his increased drinking. But then Harley alludes to an incident shortly after he returned from the war, and Tayo wonders how unchanged Harley really is. Harley went to help his family move their sheep to the Monta-o, which was less affected by the drought than the surrounding areas. Without any warning, Harley left the sheep, the dog, and his horse. He ended up in jail and half of the animals had been killed. As Tayo listens to Harley laugh about the incident, he realizes that Harley feels nothing. Tayo had his own problems, including a fight in a bar where he almost killed another old friend, Emo. Now both Tayo and Harley have been left in the desert to watch over the deserted ranches while their families care for the livestock in greener pastures. Tayo is happy to be alone; not Harley. Still, Tayo is easily convinced to join Harley on the long ride to the reservation line and the bars. As they ride, Tayo thinks about how his grandmother and Auntie talk about Rocky so much that Tayo feels Rocky was the one who survived the war, while he died, only his body has yet to be buried. Tayo starts to cry, and he feel himself back in the Philippines as he looses consciousness to sunstroke. Harley gets Tayo into the shade to rest.

Analysis

Ceremony is not divided into chapters; there are fifty-three long indents at the beginnings of paragraphs which indicate a separation into sections, but these sections are not numbered. Poems are interspersed throughout the novel at irregular intervals. The lack of easily identifiable section divisions in the story is a physical, formal (in form) reflection of the themes of interconnection between all things, repetition, and of the unclear lines between dream, myth, memory, and reality. As Silko refuses to conform to the standard presentation of a novel, in chapter form, she refuses to make her story conform exactly to traditional American standards. Similarly, as she seamlessly combines prose and poetry, she ignores standard generic (of genre) divisions. Ceremony is not only a story about Native Americans, it is a Native American story.

The poetic sections of the novel tell traditional Native American stories. The poetic form suggests that they are sung or chanted. These are part poem, part story, and part prayer. The narrator and speaker in these poems shifts between a first person singular and a third person, but these are the stories of the collective. There is not one narrator or one speaker who sings them. While they are clearly set apart from the prose narrative by the shift in form, the poems reflect the events of the rest of the story. In fact, they tell the same story, with different characters, as old Grandma remarks at the end of the novel. The poems also tell of the traditional Native American ceremonies, while the prose narrative must create a new ceremony. As the poems and the prose are woven together, so are the old and new ceremonies. In addition, the entire novel is framed by a poem, which begins with the single word, "sunrise" and continues on the very last page. In this way, the whole story is contained within a poem, so that the prose narrative as well as the poems, are part of a traditional Native American prayer, poem, or story. The poem "Ceremony" thematizes this idea. It also demonstrates the repetitive and interlocking nature of the novel. With the same title as the book, "Ceremony" is a poem within a story, whose subject is stories within poems. The two opening poems also comment on the power of stories to create and to change the world. Ceremony is not just a story about ceremonies, it is a ceremony itself.

As a result of the trauma of fighting in World War II, Tayo's dreams are haunted, and he is troubled by an inability to separate memories from dreams from reality. He is caught in a past moment that keeps on taking over both his sleep and his waking hours. Much of Tayo's distress comes from his confusion of his uncle Josiah with the Japanese soldiers he was killing. This confusion results in part from the similar physical characteristics of Native Americans and Japanese. The physical similarity is most likely due to a common ancestry. Tayo's recognition of this similarity demonstrates not a realization of ancient migratory patterns, but of the interconnectedness of all people. However, he cannot identify it as such. Tayo only feels that he is terribly confused, and must be partially crazy. This feeling has been reinforced by his time spent at a Veteran's Hospital. Although he left the hospital with a stronger awareness of himself and a greater desire to live than he had at the very ending of the war, Tayo's encounter with Harley shows that all of the native Americans who fought in World War II were traumatized in a way that has not been addressed. The men self-medicate with alcohol, which dulls their senses, but also unleashes the sadness, fear, and anger which they still carry.