Ceremony Synthesis and Analysis

Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko

• Author: Leslie Marmon Silko
• Setting:
• The Laguna Pueblo Reservation in the American Southwest.
• Sometime not long after the end of World War II.
• Plot:
• Tayo returns from the war and must recover in a veteran’s hospital after his mental breakdown from seeing his Uncle Josiah’s face as they killed Japanese prisoners.
• Tayo is finally released from the hospital and sent home to the reservation where he lives with Auntie, but he is still unwell.
• The reservation is having a severe drought which Tayo attributes to his prayers for it to stop raining which he prayed as he watched Rocky, his cousin, die in the war.
• Tayo joins his friends who also fought in the war, Harley, Emo, Pinkie, and Leroy in their version of medication, which is drinking and telling stories from the war.
• Old Grandma attempts to help Tayo by calling the medicine man, but that is only the beginning of his healing process, and it doesn’t work very well.
• Tayo remembers his childhood now, about how Auntie had tried to keep Rocky and himself separate but still they were pretty good friends, and how Josiah had helped raise him.  The most important part of the recollection is his encounter with Night Swan when he went to deliver a note from Josiah.
• After this recollection Tayo is sent to see Betonie, the medicine man who combines the new things with the old ceremonies and uses them to make a ceremony for Tayo that will heal him and stop the world destruction that is happening because of witchery.
• Tayo goes home and must complete his ceremony, so he must find Josiah’s cattle, in doing so he meets Ts’eh and the mountain lion.  His encounter with Ts’eh is one that helped heal him, but must continue to get the complete effects.
• After returning with the cattle Tayo goes and spends the summer with Ts’eh in the desert by the ranch.  This time really heals most of Tayo’s problems.
• Emo and the police come looking for Tayo, but Tayo avoids them thanks to the directions of Ts’eh.  He is almost captured by Harley and Leroy while on the run, but manages to escape them too.
• Tayo reaches the final part of his ceremony when he runs to the abandoned Uranium mine, where he has to stay and keep himself from killing Emo when Emo and his gang show up and torture Harley.
• After he manages to finish the ceremony he returns to the elders of the Laguna and they determine that the completion of Tayo’s ceremony is the blessing that will end the drought, because Ts’eh was actually the Land.
• Main Characters:

o       Tayo – Tayo is an enduring and persevering character, he manages to endure and suffer through all of his mental sickness and then his ceremony, which healed the whole area, not just himself.  

o       Josiah – Josiah was very kind and not easily manipulated by the thoughts or disapproval of others, like in his relationship with Nigh Swan.  Josiah is basically the man who raised Tayo, he taught Tayo how to understand his childhood, and he was the one Tayo saw die in World War II even though he was not present in the war.

o       Ts’eh – Ts’eh is the woman who brings healing to Tayo’s life, she is the Land, and through his relationship with this woman who is so wise, knowledgeable, and wholesome Tayo becomes whole.

o       Betonie – Betonie is a wise old medicine man who knows that the old rituals cannot completely heal the wounds that are made by the new, so he combines the new thing and old rituals to help Tayo and begin his ceremony.

o       Emo – Emo is pretty much purely evil from what we see and from Tayo’s point of view.  Emo is manipulating, unkind, cares only for himself; he doesn’t care about the land, and is always voicing the bad side of things.

·        Narrative Voice:  The narrative voice of this novel is very interesting; it combines these poem-like stories in the middle of the prose sections, creating an odd flow of Tayo’s story and a similar one from Native American folk tale ideas.  This narrative structure and voice is unique as far as I know, and shows another side to the story if you realize they are the same thing.

• Author’s Style:

o       Point of View:  Silko’s point of view as a Native American gives this novel strength, her knowledge of the culture is so important to the novel because it brings in a new way to look at the same idea.  One example of this is the fact that Tayo sees the draught as his fault, but he is able to cure it through this ceremony he goes through.  In other cultures the solution to a draught may be similar, praying or other options, but the ceremony is healing and only really seen from the Native American perspective.

o       Tone:  The tone of Silko’s novel is bitter in the beginning of the novel but changes to hopeful by the end.  When Tayo is first struggling with his illness the novel sounds bitter in all the actions that are happening and some of the words seem to make it dark and bitter.  By the end of the novel though, the actions and the details of the story are looking more hopeful and even the diction of the later parts seems more hope filled than the early, darker words.

o       Imagery:  The imagery that Silko includes is impeccable; the descriptions of the landscapes and the settings are amazing and this puts more meaning in the story because the colors included bring some meaning of their own into the meaning of the scene.

o       Symbolism:  Ceremony is filled with symbols, circles, directions, and colors all have meanings beyond what they seem.  The colors in Silko’s novel sometimes have different meanings than we are used to, because at one point in the novel the color green, one we associate with life, was a suffocating color, one associated with death.  This is just one example of the different meanings the colors bring.

• Quotes:
• “She had always loved him, she had never left him; she had always been there” (255).
• This is an important quote to include showing how Ts’eh has healed Tayo through her presence and how she is healing the community too by being with Tayo.
• “’It seems like I already heard these stories before… only thing is, the names sound different” (260).
• This quote is important because it explains the nature of the Native American stories, which Silko even shows when she includes the poem-stories in between the prose sections of Tayo’s story.

·        Theme:  The stories repeat themselves over and over again, but the meaning remains, the land is healing and we are connected to it.

• The symbolism of the circles in this novel really emphasizes this theme throughout Ceremony, but also the imagery of the land illustrates how healing and connected to it we are.