"People that cannot face their past cannot adapt for the future."
Ceremony takes on two very large and difficult subjects: the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and the death of Native Americans and their culture due to European intrusion. Tayo's identity struggle falls right in the middle of the two and creates many of his problems.
Ceremony, Beloved, and MAUS each have characters who are looking back and remembering extraordinary events which changed their lives. In all of these works this process of struggling through memory and confronting difficult thoughts acts as a healing process. Speaking the unspeakable, and remembering the unthinkable helps heal wounds and provide answers to difficult questions.
Ceremony's Tayo is caught between two cultures and trying to understand exactly who he is. All of this is brought out by his position in the war and the threat of nuclear war. Jessica Vianes discusses the paradoxes in American culture which have lead to Tayo's confusion and uneasiness (American Paradoxes in Ceremony). She writes, "Native Americans were drafted to fight for the country that stole their land, yet they were expected to be patriotic, loyal, and willing to die for America." This is one of the many problems Tayo struggles to understand when he returns from the war.
In Ceremony this character is obviously Tayo. In Beloved it is Sethe. But in MAUS it is not the first hand victim of the Holocaust who is searching for answers. It is Art, the child of a survivor. John McGowan's hyper-text paper, "A Generation Removed?", examines the relationship between Art and Vladek and what Art hoped to accomplish through MAUS. His section, Art: Is He Removed?, specifically addresses this idea of Art as the child of a survivor.
This link to the Cybrary of the Holocaust takes you directly to the section entitled Children of Survivors, and shares the stories they have.