Summary and Analysis: Ceremony

Author: Leslie Silko—part Laguna Pueblo and White.

Setting: In the Laguna Pueblo reservation mostly.

Main Characters:

Tayo: He is the main character in the novel. He was left to live with Auntie and Robert at the age of 4. Throughout his life he struggles with finding that he truly is. He is half white, and have Pueblo. He goes off to war and comes home with some major PTSD (vomit everywhere). He can’t be cured with the medicine found in the Pueblo Laguna tribe, so he ventures to find medicine from the white culture, thus pulling the two sides together.

Auntie: She is very “white”. She doesn’t treat Tayo very well, and she kind of just cares about appearances and superficial things.

Josiah: Tayo’s father figure, Tayo is very upset about his death. Josiah raises the cattle. He also is all for the Pueblo culture.

Rocky: Has been assimilated into the white culture. He is very well liked by all of them, and kind of turns his back on Pueblo culture.

Grandma: Kind of just goes with the flow doesn’t really care.

Harley: Tayo’s friend who went to war with him. He came back with a drinking problem, not PTSD.

Emo: Tayo’s childhood acquaintance. Him and Tayo don’t like each other much, and he attacks him at a bar for saying white people are better than Pueblos.

Plot:

            The book opens with Tayo and his grief for his newly lost “bros” Rocky and Josiah. There is also a drought in the Pueblo reservation and now Tayo believes that this is his fault. He is struggling with that assumption for some time. He throws up all the time, and this is because of his PTSD problem that needs to be fixed. He stays at home with Auntie, Robert, and Grandma since his mother abandoned him at the age of 4. His father is white, but he doesn’t have any idea who exactly his father is.

            When Tayo does return from the war, he realizes that his other friends are also going through the same sickness problems as he is, yet they handle it a different way: through alcohol. They don’t realize that this is a temporary solution though, and it really does a lot more harm than they think. Because of this, Grandma calls in the Pueblo medicine man, Ku’oosh, and he performs a ceremony that does very little help to Tayo. Auntie really doesn’t like Tayo, and we can see throughout the novel that she wishes he had died instead of Rocky.

            The summer that they got enlisted in the army, Josiah bought some cattle. Night Swan, his companion, encourages this idea. Then, another medicine man is called in on behalf of curing Tayo, Betonie. He is more connected with the white culture. Tayo then leaves to find the cattle and to complete the new ceremony, yet he finds them in the mountain. Then, he runs into T’seh and spends almost the whole summer with her. Then, he is told that Emo and his other friends are causing problems back in the reservation, and they are blaming it on Tayo and telling the police.

            To get away from the police, he follows T’sehs advice. He realizes that to complete the ceremony, he has to hide in a minefield that he has come across to add the element of white culture. Emo and his friends are there and Emo tries to get him to come out of his hiding spot by torturing Harvey. Tayo doesn’t fall for it though, and returns to Ku’oosh to tell him what have happened. Ku’oosh then says he has been cured, and the ceremony ends.

Theme:

A big theme in this book is that you have to balance cultures in your life, but you can’t just pick one. You always need the equal balance. Tayo is the perfect example of this. He clearly can’t just live off of Indian culture, or just white. He needs both of the medicine men in his life.

Narrator: 3^rd person

Symbols/motifs:

Speckles on cattle: represent stars or Tayo’s mixed cultures.

Colors/directions: show how detail is very important in his life

Alcohol: shows how it can’t be the only cure, its only temporary.

Quotes:

1.     “Nothing was all good or all bad either; it all depended.” This quote shows how not one thing is purely all good or all bad. You have to look at everything in multiple ways, that’s just how life works. You can’t completely categorize things as all good and all bad.

2.     “It seems like I already heard these stories before—only thing is, the name sounds different.” Grandma says this and it really reinforces the idea of reciprocity in the Indian culture. Everything is the same story, just repeated differently. She is connecting the past and present all in one.