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Sue Bull
English 340
5 December 2003
To call Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1977 novel, Ceremony, the story of one day in the life of
minimum, it asks the typical Western-oriented reader to set aside a linear concept of time and
embrace another way of thinking. Silko’s presentation will ask the reader to do much more than
is minimally required, however, to understand Tayo’s day. Among other creative choices, she
shares authorship with the person of Thought-Woman, she uses multiple points of view, and
most noticeably, she combines genres in order to tell this story, incorporating traditional Pueblo
myths in poetry form with narrative prose. The poems are representative of the Native American
oral tradition of storytelling, while the prose represents a typical Western written tradition. In this
way, the novel retains the essential elements of Pueblo mythology while integrating
contemporary experiences. Which of these approaches best represents reality becomes a central
question for Tayo and for the reader. From the first one word poem, “Sunrise,” to the closing
poetic prayer, “Sunrise, accept this offering, Sunrise,” Ceremony, with its distinctive structure,
will hold Tayo in its center and heal him in those hours between dawns (Silko 4; 262). By
combining storytelling techniques, Silko causes an interaction between two cultures, resulting in
a synergistic novel, one greater than the exclusive use of either tradition might achieve.
describe “any extended fictional narrative almost always in prose” that is held together by “some
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organizing principle—plot, theme, or idea” (Harmon and Holman 342). Novels can be classified
according to subject matter, such as historical novel or psychological novel, adding further
complexity to a comprehensive meaning (Harmon and Holman 344). The development of the
different movements, such as realism, romanticism, or naturalism, giving the genre term a
dynamic definition. The same could be said for other genres. According to A Handbook to
Literature, “Genre boundaries have been much subject to flux and blur in recent times, and it is
almost the rule that a successful work will combine genres in some original way” (Harmon and
Holman 226). Silko does so in Ceremony. The novel is replete with the usual organizing
principles of plot and themes, but the structure of Ceremony is atypical in that it is non-linear,
adding further depth and richness to the melding of genres. The construction may, initially, seem
confusing and disassociated to readers, obscuring for the Western mind, to varying degrees, the
Her mix of literary choices about the arrangement of Tayo’s story certainly reflects her
own mixed ancestry—Laguna Pueblo, white, and Mexican—but she draws most heavily on her
Native American heritage and upbringing to craft Ceremony. In contrast to linear novels in
which the plot is typically revealed by the author as one event follows another, in Ceremony, the
plot is discovered by the reader. The reader is compelled to become active in making sense of the
various plot devices used by Silko and the order in which they are presented. Karen Piper, in an
article for American Indian Quarterly, explains this as “a spatial and chronological enigma in
need of understanding or ordering” (485). The book is not organized by chapters, but sections of
the text, generally brief, are simply separated by gaps in the print between paragraphs. Other
section breaks occur with the insertion of poems of Laguna Pueblo mythology. There is one
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visual image in the novel, a black and white depiction of stars. Some prose sections are no longer
than a single paragraph; a single word constitutes a poem. Each section tells at least a piece of a
different story. Some stories seem self-contained. Furthermore, Silko’s use of pronouns can be
ambiguous, forcing the reader to consider if their antecedents are in the immediately preceding
Silko’s sequencing of stories suggests that events which exist in memory are experienced
with the same intensity as events of the present. In other words, stories remembered live in the
present as much as any story of the present lives in the present. In this way, Silko creates what
indicative of her Native American culture, as explained by Silko in a 1979 speech about her
book:
criss-crossing each other. As with the web, the structure will emerge as
it is made and you must simply listen and trust, as the Pueblo people
While there are traditional Western elements of plot contained in Silko’s webbed novel, she
seems to rebel against the requirements of Aristotle’s Poetics for a beginning “which does not
itself follow anything by causal necessity” (qtd. in Harmon and Holman 386). Yet, her novel
does, in fact, begin with a very essential beginning, a creation myth spun about Thought-Woman,
a spider. It may be tempting for the reader to set aside this poem as a piece of the plot and start
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with the prose narrative in which the main character, Tayo, is introduced. To do so, however,
would mean missing an important clue about meaning. Attributing the story of Ceremony to
Thought-Woman puts the novel into a proper Native American framework, according to Adam
Ceremony opens with the invocation of Thought-Woman, who “is sitting in her
room and whatever she thinks about appears.” The novel itself is put into an oral
context: “I’m telling you the story she is thinking” (1). There is the link between
narrative and spirituality but also between the power of story and the very making
of the world: if Thought Woman called the world into being by thinking, as
Pueblo tradition has it, and if Thought Woman is similarly thinking this story into
being, then the story itself is a kind of world, or has the power to create one. (Sol
30-31)
Subsequent poems on pages two and three reinforce this idea, educating the reader about the
essential importance of story to life. Tayo’s story is the basic plot of the novel in the Western
sense: it could be summarized as the healing of Tayo, a traumatized World War II veteran who
returns to his Laguna Pueblo reservation home after being hospitalized for, but not cured of, a
debilitating illness. But it is Silko’s embedding of stories within stories that carries the main plot,
not from beginning to middle to end as Aristotle would have it, but from beginning to end to
beginning with a masterful use of middles throughout, a non-Western approach. This circular
organization is further manifested in the structure of the healing ceremony that medicine man,
Betonie, performs for Tayo, as critic Robert C. Bell explains: “Through repetition and
recapitulation, the novel itself describes a circular design going into and out of the hoop
The presentation of time as Tayo experiences it in the story, and consequently, as the
reader must be willing to experience it, is due in great part, to the merger of the two major types
of stories Silko incorporates. These types are, as critic Elaine Jahner describes, “timeless and
time-bound” or “contemporary and mythical” (43). Along with Tayo, the reader must make
connections between the events of the myths and the events of his life, between the events of the
past and those of the present. Silko thereby promotes the Native American worldview that the
chronological aspect of time is of little importance (Weaver 217). In an interview Silko remarked
on the concept of historical time: “I just grew up with people who followed, or whose world
vision was based on a different way of organizing human experience, natural cycles” (Coltelli
242). She continued by explaining how her use of “narratives within narratives within narratives”
takes the “ultimate control” out of the hands of the narrator and puts it into the hands of the
stories themselves (Coltelli 244). The readers can then become actors in the stories, not merely
passive audiences. Silko explains how her upbringing influenced how she wishes her stories to
One of the things I was taught to do from the time I was a little child was to listen
to the story about you personally right now. To take all of that in for what it
means right now, and for what it means to the future. But at the same time to
appreciate how it fits in with what you did yesterday, last week… (Coltelli 244)
Silko would have her readers take Tayo’s story personally, communing with her character and
In addition to the embedding of stories, Silko associates the circular structure of the novel
to the Laguna concept of time in other ways. Critic Louis Owens points to several examples: the
Mexican infinity symbol branded on the mixed blood cattle; the layers of old calendars, which
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are out of chronological order; and the assortment of Betonie’s belongings, which form a pattern
of circles around the room (183). Richard Fleck, in the introduction to his Critical Perspectives
on Native American Fiction, writes that Silko also uses stream-of-consciousness to give the
reader a sense of a non-linear “geological layering of time through Tayo’s river of thoughts” (3).
Perhaps the linkage of Pueblo concept of time and the webbed stories are best explained in
Tayo’s own thoughts. He is remembering a day before the war when he and his uncle Josiah
were in the valley. Tayo woke early to meet the sunrise and performed his own created ceremony
to induce rain:
Everywhere he looked, he saw a world made of stories, the long ago, time
immemorial stories, as old Grandma called them. It was a world alive, always
changing and moving; and if you knew where to look, you could see it, sometimes
almost imperceptible, like the motions of the stars across the sky. (Silko 95)
As he observes the world around him, alive with blue dragonflies and pregnant spiders, Tayo
discover the plot, her choices also help the reader to explore some important themes. For
example, her use of mixed genre complements her ideas about mixed-blood American Indians
who often struggle with greater difficulty, or at least differently, than full-bloods do. Racism
prevails against them both on and off the reservation. On the reservation, Tayo is keenly aware,
thanks to Auntie’s constant reminders, of the shame his mother brought to the family for mixing
with white men, including Tayo’s unidentified father, and Tayo’s fellow war veteran Emo taunts
him for possessing white blood (Silko 57). Off the reservation, especially in riverbanks near
Gallup, New Mexico, Tayo witnesses the racist oppression of Native people, many of them
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mixed-bloods (Silko 115). However, Owens observes that, although Tayo is typical of many
mixed-bloods depicted in American Indian literature who are “lost between cultures and
identities,” Silko ultimately portrays this mixed-blood as “a rich source of power and something
to be celebrated rather than mourned” (26). Likewise, Old Betonie, also a green-eyed, mixed-
blood Navajo Indian, is a more powerful medicine man in healing the World War II veteran than
the Laguna traditionalist, Old Ku’oosh, who initially tries a Scalp Ceremony even though it has
already proven unsuccessful for other war veterans (Silko 38). Betonie, who lives on the edge of
several worlds—the Pueblo and Navajo reservations and the American city of Gallup—
recognizes the contemporary world in which Native Americans live and incorporates things from
the White world into his curative ceremonies, such as calendars and telephone books. Silko does
credit Ku’oosh with enough wisdom to know his traditional practices to be inadequate, but she
uses the wisdom of mixed-blood, non-Pueblo Betonie to promote the idea that ceremonies and
stories must change in the same way that the people’s circumstances change. The cures must
The people nowadays have an idea about the ceremonies. They think the
ceremonies must be performed exactly as they have always been done…But long
ago when the people were given these ceremonies, the changing began, if only in
the aging of the yellow gourd rattle or the shrinking of the skin around the eagle’s
claw, if only in the different voices from generation to generation, singing the
chants. You see, in many ways ceremonies have always been changing. (Silko
126)
Betonie’s adaptation of the traditional ceremonies reflects his willingness to risk the “mistrust”
of the people, but he tells Tayo that “only this growth keeps the ceremonies strong” (Silko 126).
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As part of the curative ceremony for Tayo, Betonie urges him to seek Josiah’s runaway cattle.
This stronger breed of cattle is a surviving breed, a mixed-breed, symbolic of Tayo’s strength
and survival, and perhaps offered by Silko as a key to the survival of the Laguna or other Native
people. Betonie, in “a vision of stars, cattle, a woman, and a mountain,” lays out a story for Tayo
to live (Silko 186). Tayo proceeds to follow Betonie’s vision, “not expecting to find anything
more than the winter constellation in the north sky overhead; but suddenly Betonie's vision was a
story he could feel happening - from the stars and the woman, the mountain and the cattle would
come” (Silko 186). Bell suggests, “Tayo’s search for the cattle becomes the mythical hero’s
quest for wholeness,” demonstrating that “natural and supernatural” worlds, temporal and
mythical worlds meld in Tayo’s completion of the healing ceremony (26). The mixing of blood,
of cultures, of worlds combines to create strength and power for those willing to live the stories.
As Tayo lives Betonie’s vision, he realizes the power of stories to bring forth reality, a
traditional way of being and understanding that Silko’s mix of myth and narrative perpetuates.
The stories, considered in this context, compete for Tayo’s life, pitting lovers against liars,
creators against destroyers. Tayo recognizes Emo as a destroyer. A man who plays with the
human teeth of an enemy soldier and delights in his identification, no matter how tenuous, with
the United States Army and its mortars, grenades, and flame-throwers (Silko 62), “Emo fed off
each man he killed” (61). Silko creates a new poem for the Emoes—the destroyers and liars—of
Tayo’s world, a poem that does not affirm the Laguna Pueblo’s identity, but denies it when the
main character in the poem, presumably Emo, lies in order to seduce the white women in the bar
(57-59). Owens writes that Emo and other destructive forces in the novel weave “overall
witchery” ceremonies which are “conducted in places such as bars and pickup trucks” and serve
to prevent Tayo from healing (171). But Tayo has a spirit that is often able to recognize and
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name evil even though he may not know what to do about it. Betonie defines evil for Tayo as
“trickery of the witchcraft” (Silko 132). He explains that white people, whose cities, machines,
foods, and innate respect Emo covets, were inventions of “Indian witchery” (Silko 132). A
mythical poem, which Lori Burlingame writes “is the only myth in the novel that Silko
originated and that does not have a counterpart in Pueblo mythology” (8), relates the origins of
white people, saying that whites were created as part of a “contest in dark things” (Silko 133). A
variety of witches from different tribes competes for the greatest display of witchery. Some boil
babies in blood, others display amputated human parts of a most intimate nature, but one witch
does not use material manifestations of power. Instead, the winning witch tells a story. As stories
have the power to do, the witch’s tale brings the destroyers of the earth, the white people, to life
(Silko 131-38). Yet, Betonie relates this myth, not to confirm a misguided and detrimental but
common idea among Native people that whites are the root of evil and the cause of all Indian ills,
but rather to reinforce what Tayo has already grown to suspect. To continue to blame whites for
the troubles of Native Americans is to aid and abet his people’s bewitching. Betonie reassures
Tayo that they “can deal with the white people” who are a creation of the Indian stories, and that
the solution will not be found in separation from them as that only leads to destruction (Silko
132).
destruction and its significance to Tayo’s healing. It is the place where Tayo rejoices at “finally
seeing the pattern,” and where he will conclude his ceremony in triumph over the witchery (Silko
246). This site, an abandoned uranium mine, is located between two additional prime sites of
destruction: the place where the first atomic bomb was invented and the place where it was
tested. In this place, a “circle of death that devoured people in cities twelve thousand miles
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away” unites all of mankind—Indians, whites, Japanese, all races—with the common threat of
destruction (Silko 246). When he arrives at this place after escaping from the potentially deadly
clutches of Emo’s thugs, Leroy and Harley, “the old stories, the war stories, their stories” and the
story “that was still being told” all come into perspective for Tayo (Silko 246). He believes he
only needs to “keep the story out of the hands of the destroyers” a little longer in order to
complete his ceremony (Silko 247). Like Jesus in the wilderness, Tayo, during his night watch, is
tempted by the witchery. It would ask him to become a destroyer himself, to bash in Emo’s skull
the way that the Japanese had bashed in his brother/cousin Rocky’s skull in the beginning of the
novel, to fight evil with evil as he witnesses his so-called friends obliterate one another in their
own ceremony of destruction in this anti-holy place. He knows to succumb would give the
destroyers more excuses to condemn the Indian, and would give the Indian more excuses to
condemn himself. He would be responsible for completing a ceremony of witchery. In one of her
less enigmatic discourses in the book, Silko’s narration describes Tayo’s conclusions:
Their deadly ritual for the autumn solstice would have been completed by him. He
would have been another victim, a drunken Indian war veteran settling an old
feud; and the Army doctors would say that the indications of this end had been
there all along, since his release from the mental ward at the Veterans’ Hospital in
Los Angeles. The white people would shake their heads, more proud than sad that
it took a white man to survive in their world and that these Indians couldn’t seem
to make it. At home the people would blame liquor, the Army, and the war, but
the blame on the whites would never match the vehemence the people would keep
in their own bellies, reserving the greatest bitterness and blame for themselves, for
But Tayo, now seeing the patterns, diagnoses himself as never having been crazy (Silko 246). He
also sees himself as part of something much larger than one individual’s struggle for survival;
therefore, he does not participate in the cycle of destruction in the novel’s climax. Silko’s
interjection of a Laguna myth at the point in the novel when Tayo knows he must protect the
story from the destroyers for the night correlates Tayo—the witness and watchman, the one who
can tell the story, the one with memories—with the observer in the poem who prevents the
witchman’s evil magic from being more than partially fulfilled: “‘Something is wrong,’ [the
witchman] said. ‘Ck’o’yo magic won’t work if someone is watching us’” (Silko 247). The evil
circles back on itself in the end: “Its own witchery has returned all around it” (Silko 261). This
Competing with powers of lies and destruction are stories of creation and love that are
essential to Tayo’s ceremony. Besides Ku’oosh and Betonie, there are a number of persons who
help Tayo on his journey, most significantly, a woman whom Tayo encounters as Betonie
envisioned. She is Ts’eh, whom Paula Allen Gunn explains is “the matrix, the creative and life-
restoring power” and the “feminine principle of creation” (233). In looking for the cattle, Tayo
encounters this ocher-eyed female (Silko 177). They commence a sexual affair that is so
powerful and healing for Tayo that he rejoices in living and breathing (Silko 181). Silko
interjects a “Sunrise!” song of praise as though to celebrate with Tayo in this reaffirmation of
life, this awakening (182). Throughout the remainder of the novel, she uses a repetitious
association of the sunrise with wellness as Tayo and Ts’eh often rise before dawn (181). Later,
though they are physically apart, in dreaming of her, Tayo is awakened with “the first dim light”
and offers a prayer to the sunrise (Silko 215-16). Simply remembering the woman’s love is the
same as experiencing her love when Tayo returns to his Auntie’s house, and again, a rainy dawn
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accompanies his thoughts of her (Silko 218). Ts’eh is not simply a perfect lover for Tayo,
however. A visionary like Betonie, she warns Tayo of destructive forces that are moving to
pursue him. Also like Betonie, she clarifies that it is not the white men who are the true enemy,
but rather Emo and Tayo’s fellow Native American war veterans who mean to hunt him down
(Silko 232). After escaping the destructive ceremony at the mine shaft and completing his
healing ceremony, renewed and purified, Tayo goes to the Ku’oosh and other tribal elders to
share his story. Of all the stories he has lived in his journey to wholeness, it is his story of the
woman who peaks the elders’ interest: What color were her eyes? From which direction did she
come? Silko answers with a poem to show that the elders interpret Tayo’s encounter with Ts’eh
as a spiritual blessing awaiting them all (Silko 257). The love is not contained to Tayo, but
extends to his community, restoring him to their common humanity. Through Tayo, Silko holds
out hope for Native Americans who struggle to live in a contemporary world. Following the
death (at least for now) of the witchery, Silko’s sunrise poem ends the novel, giving both the last
Tayo’s story becomes a love offering to the sunrise of the next morning. By telling the
story Thought-Woman is thinking in Ceremony, Silko shares, not a typical novel’s narrative of
one thing occurring after another, but the arrangement of a ceremony. In experiencing Tayo’s
story through the combination of traditional oral myths with narrative prose in a presentation that
defies linear time, Silko creates a masterful novel that is greater than the sum of its parts. The
reader is brought into the ceremony and can consider the possibility of Tayo’s tale as a single
Works Cited
Allen, Paula Gunn. “The Feminine Landscape of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony.” Critical
Bell, Robert C. “Circular Design in Ceremony.” Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony: A Casebook.
Brown, Alana Kathleen. “Pulling Silko’s Thread Through Time: An Exploration of Storytelling.”
Runner in the Sun: A Story of Indian Maize, James Welch’s Fools Crow, and Leslie
Coltelli, Laura. “Leslie Marmon Silko.” Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony: A Casebook. Ed.
Harmon, William, and Hugh Holman. A Handbook to Literature. 9th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Jahner, Elaine. “Event Structure in Ceremony.” Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony: A Casebook.
Owens, Louis. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman, OK: U of
Oklahoma P, 1992.
Piper, Karen. “Police Zones: Territory and Identity in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony.”
Sol, Adam. “The Story as It’s Told.” American Indian Quarterly. 23.3-4 (1999): 24-62.
Weaver, Jace. “Leslie Marmon Silko.” Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony: A Casebook. Ed. Allan