One important symptom of the disease that the ceremony of Ceremony is designed to cure is flawed vision, physiological as well as psychological. At the beginning of the novel, Tayo does indeed suffer from physiological eyestrain—sunlight hurts his eyes so much that he vomits, and we are told that “he had to keep moving so that the sinews connected behind his eyes did not slip loose and spin his eyes to the interior of his skull where the scenes [World War II flashbacks] waited for him.” This early in the novel Tayo is desperate for a vision of biomechanics that aligns with the felt reality of his condition. Tayo also suffers from flawed psychological vision, mainly as a result of being contaminated by certain preconceptions that he, like most Americans, has acquired from the social environment. Tayo’s doctor Betonie later tells him that the Ck’o’yo witchery has created these preconceptions and put them into circulation to blind Indians into believing that the land is a dead thing and that, to put it in mid-twentieth century terminology, White is Right. In one important sense, then, the measure of Tayo’s recovery is change, or improvement, in his vision—physiological and psychological, and vision in the sense of perception as well as in the sense of conception or ideation. As I and others have argued elsewhere, Silko works to align the prose narrative story of Tayo’s transformation with the poetic-looking body of traditional Laguna narrative embedded in the text and functioning as the novel’s formal and thematic backbone. Two of these embedded texts are particularly germane to the theme of transformed—and transforming—vision. One of these is the Kaupata story that functions as a prologue and preview of the Mount Taylor episode; the other is the brief Arrowboy fragment that serves the same function for the Jackpile Mine episode. These two backbone stories treat the phenomenon of vision rather differently, one picking up the possibilities of development of vision where the other leaves off; like two of Betonie’s colored mountains, they represent successive phases of the overall process of moving from lack or loss of vision to recovery of it. In the accompanying phases of the prose narrative, Tayo must understand, and then use, the modes of vision modeled in these two stories of departure and recovery in order to become the one who can tell the story of Our Mother’s return to the Fifth World and to the People who are her children.

Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony is a novel about a young man named Tayo who returns to the Laguna Reservation, probably in 1948, after horrifying experiences on the Pacific front in World War II and an unspecified period of time in a Veteran’s Administration hospital in California. He comes home a psychological mess after being released from a prisoner of war camp, probably in the Philippines. In one sense, Tayo’s story is straightforward enough. A man grows from confusion to clarity, from being lost to being found, from being muddleheaded to being clearheaded, from being alone to getting connected, from feeling afraid to feeling confident, from thinking of himself as a villain to realizing that he may just be a hero. Why, then, do so many first-time readers of Ceremony get so confused by this narrative? The central reason is that most of the novel takes place in the consciousness of Tayo, who, for the first hundred or so pages, has no idea who he is or where he is going. Part of Tayo’s problem is that he cannot sort things out properly; part of his madness is that he cannot distinguish past from present. And just as his mind is a jumble of events, the opening of the novel portrays unsorted, jumbled events. On the second page of the novel Tayo speaks of the tangle of events and memories in his mind: The memories were tangled with the present, tangled up like colored threads from old Grandma’s wicker sewing basket when he was a child, and he had carried them outside to play and they had spilled out of his arms into the summer weeds and rolled away in all directions, and then he had hurried to pick them up before Auntie found him. He could feel it inside his skull, the tension of little threads being pulled and how it was with tangled things, things tied together, and as he tried to pull them apart and rewind them into their places, they snagged and tangled even more.