American Indian Culture and Research Journal

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.