For me this passage from Ceremony is a powerful and telling opening to Tayo's story. Tayo is looking for something solid, something real, something true. He is unsure of who he is or what he is or what he has been through. His return from the war has only brought an entanglement of thoughts and memories--past and present interwoven and somehow connected . He begins his journey in search of, "something that wasn't unraveled or tied in knots to the past--something that existed by itself, standing alone like a deer." Unsure of where he is going or what he is looking for he steps into the void, struggling for answers and groping for soemething to hold on to.

In writing Ceremony it is evident that Silko is not just writing to tell the story of Tayo, but rather she is seeking out some truth for herself--something to hold on to and understand. Toni Morrison mentions this same idea in an interview about Beloved. She is not just telling a story, but trying to understand something. The same holds true for Art Spiegelman's MAUS. It is a journey to seek out meaning and understanding.

With these books the aspectof storytelling and the form in which the story will be told takes on much more meaning. Silko's Ceremony includes both the Western tradition of narrative text and the Native American tradition of oral storytelling. Her writing combines the oral and written aspects of two cultures in telling a story which spans several cultures and traditions. This use of both forms is symbolic of Tayo's sturggle with identity in the novel.

Silko was obviously concerned with the form of the novel. She did not want to sacrifice the Native American tradition just for the sake of conforming to the 'accepted' way of writing. In her book Storyteller, Silko writes about her Aunt Susie and the disappearance of the oral tradition due to European influence.

"She was of a generation,

the last generation here at Laguna,

that passed down an entire culture

by word of mouth

an entire history

an entire vision of the world

which depended upon memory

and retelling by subsequent generations.

She must have realized

that the atmosphere and conditions

which had maintained this oral tradition in Laguna culture

had been irrevocably altered by the European intrusion--

away from Laguna to Indian schools,

taking the children away from the tellers who had

in all past generations

told the children

an entire culture, an entire identity of people.

(Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller)

Blanca Ruiz's hyper-text paper, "Retelling America", addresses Native American story telling in more detail.

Another important aspect of Silko's writing in Ceremony is its progression in a non-linear manner. Rarely do we speak, think, and remember in chronological order. Our thoughts are often random and spontaneous. Ceremony weaves in and out of the conscious and sub-conscious thoughts of Tayo, jumping from the present to the past and back in the blink of an eye. The style of writing reflects a journey through thoughts and memory rather than a straight progression through events.

Toni Morrison's Beloved works in a similar manner. The novel jumps from past to present as Sethe's memories fill the pages and scatter through time. In an in-class essay, one of the groups wrote, "Morrison's approach in Beloved echos this sentiment of indirect storytelling of events. Sethe does not tell the story so much as she works to remember the events. A signifcicant part of Sethe's memory is the act of remembering. This makes the reconstruction of the course of events fragmented..."

Art Spiegelman also grapples with htis idea in telling Vladek's story in MAUS. Though MAUS for the most part progresses chronologically, in remembering events, Vladek jumps fairly inconsistently. At one point, in order to keep his story in order, Art must remind his father to move chronologically through events.

Alexandra Reck's hyper-text paper, Ceremony: An Exploration of Characters and Themes, also looks at this idea and includes some great links to Holocaust memories and slave narratives.

Click on the image below to find out about links to other pages about Native American storytelling on the web.