Ceremony Analysis

At the time this novel is set, in the late 1940s, Laguna is no bustling metropolis. As a part of the Native American reservation system established by the United States' Bureau of Indian Affairs in...

Ceremony is told from the point of view of an all-knowing third party. The narrator knows exactly what's going on in Tayo's brain, and he (we'll call him he) gives it to us in all its gory detail....

It's no surprise that Ceremony doesn't neatly fit into any one category or genre. After all, Leslie Marmon Silko is pretty much the most hipster author this side of the Mississippi. She didn't give...

Silko's description of Tayo's love affair with Ts'eh is a perfect example of the tone of the novel:Their days together had a gravity emanating from the mesas and arroyos. (XXV.116)OK, that's a beau...

The most notable aspect of Silko's style in Ceremony is the way she allows traditional Laguna folklore and ceremonial ritual to tell part of Tayo's story. The inclusion of segments of stories and r...

From the beginning of the novel, Silko makes it apparent that the concept of "ceremony" is a pretty big deal. It's an idea that's rooted in the oral tradition of Laguna Pueblo culture.The novel ope...

The novel's final poem is teensy-tiny—only three lines long. That doesn't keep it from packing quite the punch, though. It's a tribute to the sunrise and a repetition of the sunrise song Tayo fir...

One of the tricky things about this novel is that Silko doesn't really spell anything out for us. At the beginning, the story jumps around in time and space, and it's pretty tough to figure out wha...

Tayo has just come back from fighting in WWII. He's sick.The doctors say Tayo is suffering from "battle fatigue," which today we would call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Tayo's grandmother...

Plenty of critics have pointed out that Ceremony seems to follow the structure of a quest story. In fact, a few have described Tayo's journey as a "grail quest," referring to the legendary tales...

Tayo comes home to the Laguna Pueblo reservation after fighting in WWII, but he's sick with what the doctors call "battle fatigue." He has nightmares about fighting in the jungles and feels guilty...

Leslie Marmon Silko was one of the original recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship. She won the award in 1981, before the fellowship became known as the "Genius Grant." Does that make her a retroac...

Some of the sex described here is fairly joyless. The stories told by Tayo's drinking buddies and fellow war veterans, for example, are all about hooking up with white women. Sex in this case seems...

As you probably noticed, Ceremony references a lot of characters from Laguna Pueblo mythology. We've listed some of the most important figures below.Ts'its'tsi'nako, Thought-Woman, the spider (I, X...