House Made of Dawn (1968). Content and Description

When House Made of Dawn won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, the jury announced the arrival of a new literary voice in the United States, calling Momaday “a matured, sophisticated literary artist from the original Americas.” Widely cited as the work that launched the “Native American renaissance,” Momaday’s first novel fuses Euro-American novel form with traditional Kiowa, Pueblo, and Navajo storytelling.

Divided into four chapters and a prologue, House Made of Dawn tells the story of Abel, who struggles to find inner peace and a coherent identity. As with Homer’s Odyssey and Aeschylus’s Oresteia, House Made of Dawn tells the story of a homecoming, Abel’s return to Walatowa, New Mexico, after serving in World War II. Since his horrific experience fighting in the war, Abel finds it difficult to be a part of Pueblo life. Lost, seemingly affected with something like posttraumatic stress disorder, Abel cannot connect to others or the culture to which he belongs. House Made of Dawn tells of Abel’s journey toward wholeness and his battle to find a place in the world.

Spanning a two-week period in 1945, part 1, “The Longhair,” recounts Abel’s sexual affair with a white woman and his murder of an albino Indian. The remainder of the novel details a four- week period after Abel is released from prison in 1952. Set in Los Angeles, parts 2 and 3—“The Priest of the Sun” and “The Night Chanter”— recount Abel’s failed attempts to assimilate into white society, his struggle with alcoholism, and his attraction to violence. In part 4, “The Dawn Runner,” Abel returns to Walatowa, where he attends to his grandfather, presiding over his deathbed and arranging his funeral. Part 4 ends as Abel enters a sacred native race. With dawn breaking across the horizon, he covers himself in soot and begins to run. As the novel closes, he finds peace by setting his pace to the rhythmic chant of the Navajo Night Chant.

After the lyrical prologue, which establishes the novel’s relationship to Pueblo and Navajo oral customs, the action begins in part 1, “The Longhair,” when Abel arrives in his small Pueblo village home in northwestern New Mexico. Abel steps off the bus drunk and barely recognizes his grandfather. This scene is significant; it establishes Abel’s fallen state and serves as a commentary on alcoholism among Native Americans, which became a severe problem for veterans.

Upon returning to the United States, many Native American war veterans found themselves alienated from the U.S. government and white society, which continued to view them as second-class citizens despite their contribution to the war effort, as well as alienated from their own people, who could not imagine the horrors they had experienced. When we first encounter Abel, he is both physically and psychologically sick. The question driving House Made of Dawn is, How can Abel and those similarly alienated heal? Answering this question requires understanding the illness.

In “The Longhair,” Momaday explores the causes of Abel’s alienation. When Abel arrives in Walatowa, he “does not know” or greet Francisco, who nurtured the young Abel by introducing him to traditional Pueblo customs. Abel’s inability to recognize his grandfather, his closest living relative, indicates the depth of his estrangement. It also highlights Abel’s most striking characteristic: silence. He is the novel’s protagonist, and yet other voices—whether Tosamah’s, Benally’s, or even Francisco’s—drown out Abel’s voice. His silence is not “the older and better part of custom,” or the sign of wisdom; rather, Abel is inarticulate, unable to use language to relate to anything or anyone.

Abel’s silence mirrors his inability to connect to the world, preventing him from creating an authentic identity, a sense of self. Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a psychological illness combat veterans often experience, accounts for only part of Abel’s psychological isolation; a sense of rootlessness is conveyed in the novel’s flashbacks and narrative breaks. Several events and factors contribute to Abel’s alienation prior to the war. He never knew his father, who was “a Navajo, they said, or a Sia, or an Isleta, an outsider anyway, which made him and his mother and [his brother] Vidal somehow foreign and strange.”

His mother and brother died while Abel was young, further disaffecting him from traditional familial structures. Abel’s care fell to his grandfather, Francisco, who may have been fathered by the corrupt priest Nicolas. Of the many memories the narrator explores in “The Longhair,” Abel’s recollection of his hunt with the Eagle Watchers Society is particularly telling. A lifelong member, Francisco introduces Abel to the organization of medicine men and soothsayers. Descendants of the Bahkyush, an ancient Indian tribe reduced to near-extinction in the 19th century, the Eagle Watchers Society is a band of outsiders who never fully assimilated into the Pueblo society.

On their yearly hunt, Abel captures and binds a giant female eagle, earning the respect of the group’s members. Yet, he quickly forsakes his newfound identity with the group. Ashamed of holding the eagle captive, he kills it rather than see it imprisoned. After recounting this memory, the narrative flashes forward to Abel’s departure from Walatowa to join the military. Waiting for a cab to arrive, Abel has “no one to wish him well or tell him how it would be.” As Abel rides away, he ignores the passing landscape, focusing instead on the noise and speed of the car.

The departure scene iterates a motif that recurs throughout Momaday’s work: the modern struggle between technology and nature. For Momaday, our obsession with technology distances us from nature, a presence in our lives that promises to provide personal and communal wholeness. The narrator notes that Abel could remember “everything in advance of his going . . . [in] whole and in detail. It was the recent past, the intervention of days and years without meaning, of . . . time always immediate and confused, that he could not put together in his mind.” Without a sense of place to ground his experiences, Abel’s memory becomes fragmented.

As an act of imagination, memory is, for Momaday, necessary to our survival, to the creation of a sense of self. In the first and fourth parts of House Made of Dawn, Momaday fuses memory and place by supplementing Abel and Francisco’s recollections with long, poetic descriptions of the landscape. In order for Abel to heal, he must revive his connection to his homeland.

In addition to the chapter’s memory sequences, two events in the immediate action illustrate Abel’s alienation. The first focuses on Abel’s relationship with Angela St. John, a married white woman seeking the recuperative qualities of New Mexico’s clean air. Soon after returning to Walatowa, Abel takes a job chopping firewood for her and ultimately has a sexual affair with the already-pregnant Angela. Although she fancies herself tolerant and open-minded, Angela stereotypes Abel and the other Native Americans living in the pueblo, making it difficult to gauge her relationship to Abel. By having sex with Angela, Abel further alienates himself from traditional Pueblo society, which, as the narrator notes, has never approved of fornication with outsiders. Neither does the affair allow Abel to connect with Euro-American culture. If anything, it deepens the rift he feels.

The second event is more difficult to interpret. Although it is loaded with symbolic meaning, the narrator does not provide Abel’s motivation for murdering the albino. Though Abel never admits it, he appears to be offended when the albino flails him with a rooster during the feast of Santiago. Abel’s embarrassment signals his feelings of inadequacy, for, unlike the albino, Abel fails to pluck the rooster from the ground. Abel’s reaction also indicates the depth of his detachment from his native culture.

The albino’s hostile gesture is appropriate to the ceremonial occasion; Abel’s vengeance is not. Yet, the albino is not a hapless victim. He commands an ominous and “unnatural” presence. His eyes are “dead and raw,” his mouth “evil,” his laugh painful, a “strange, inhuman cry.” Associating the albino with a devil-like serpent, Momaday draws freely on biblical imagery in the last scene of “The Longhair,” imagery that resonates with Abel’s biblical namesake. Briefly, we are led to believe Abel reverses the curse of his Genesis predecessor; however, rather than freeing him, Abel’s revenge only leads to his own condemnation.

While the biblical language of the murder scene may not be obvious, the significance of the albino’s skin color is. In the final two paragraphs alone, the narrator uses the word white more than 20 times, aligning the albino’s wickedness with the white-skinned Europeans, who, using warfare and forced assimilation policies, annihilated Native American ways of life. Just as killing the albino fails to heal Abel’s fractured psyche, so also would taking revenge against white society be futile. Yet, the albino does not merely stand for a dominating culture. Rather, he represents Abel’s inner demons, especially his inability to solve problems peacefully. When the albino upstages Abel in the rooster ceremony, Abel recognizes the extent of his isolation and strikes out, responding as though he is still fighting in Europe.

We learn of Abel’s failure midway through the next chapter, when we encounter him badly beaten on a beach outside Los Angeles seven years later. Like the small silver fish the narrator describes in the opening paragraph, Abel is trapped in a cycle of self-sabotage that allows others to take advantage of him. “The Priest of the Sun” continues the novel’s memory-driven narrative, filling in Abel’s past, including his murder trial, his wartime experiences, and his romantic relationship with Milly, a social worker overseeing Abel’s postimprisonment reintegration. Momaday bookends these memories with two sermons by John Big Bluff Tosamah, also known as the Priest of the Sun. First appearing halfway through House Made of Dawn, Tosamah articulates some common Momaday themes.

In his first sermon, “The Gospel According to John,” Tosamah probes the use and abuse of language. Though his homily contains a good dose of irony— the lengthy monologue excoriates those who talk too much—Tosamah echoes Momaday’s “The Man Made of Words.” Despite differing in tone, both Tosamah’s speech and Momaday’s essay emphasize the importance of language in identity formation. The sermon also exposes how speakers and writers manipulate language to increase their own or their culture’s power. In the second sermon, “The Way to Rainy Mountain,” the distinction between Tosa- mah and Momaday vanishes.

In what later becomes the introduction to a full-length work of the same name, Momaday projects his family biography into the voice of Tosamah, who, as Momaday was, was removed in early childhood from the seat of Kiowa culture. Recalling his grandmother’s reverence for the Sun and the Plains, Tosamah/Momaday ponders the links among place, identity, oral tradition, and imagination. Yet Tosamah’s ironic persona undercuts his sincerity, forcing other characters— Abel and Benally, for example—to sort through rather than merely accept what he says. “Always showing off and making fun of things,” Tosamah is a trickster, an archetypal character common in Native American mythology.

The trickster persona varies—some are playful, others sinister. Whatever form the trickster takes, he or she typically uses wit and mischief to teach a lesson. Tosamah performs this function with Abel, willfully antagonizing him for his “long-hair” ways and inability to assimilate. Tosamah triggers a psychotic rage in Abel, who trips over his own feet while lunging at the grinning Priest of the Sun. Tosamah’s chiding initiates Abel’s final descent and recovery. Never returning to work, he drinks heavily and finally awakens bruised and battered on the beach.

“The Night Chanter” continues the novel’s experimentation with shifting perspectives and style, replacing the poetic voice of both the third- person narration and Tosamah’s sermons with a down-to-earth first-person account. The Night Chanter is Ben Benally, an assimilated Navajo. A potential model for Abel, Benally represents the person Abel might become were he to renounce his Pueblo heritage and embrace the American dream. Ultimately, Benally’s superficial relationship with his native culture proves an unacceptable consequence for Abel. Benally engages in his native customs as if they are mere relics.

He sings the Night Chant for amusement while getting drunk. Like the reservation lands he calls “empty and dead,” the Night Chant has lost its vitality and cultural significance. Benally’s plan to meet Abel for one last Night Chant recital signals his desire to make a clean break from the past, from his homeland, and from Navajo culture. Fittingly, the trickster figure intervenes: Tosamah calls this dream of becoming a part of American culture a “Jesus scheme” bent on shackling nonconformists. Benally discounts the tirade as an attempt to “show off.” Despite his silence and his quarrel with Tosamah, Abel understands the older man’s point: Forced assimilation and imprisonment are essentially the same.

Assimilation is, in fact, the most severe kind of incarceration. Without a cultural center, Abel also lacks his own identity. “The Dawn Runner” presents an alternative to Benally’s model. Abel returns to Walatowa, dresses his grandfather according to tribal custom, and departs for the fields outside town, where he joins the ceremonial runners in the annual dawn race. In the last section, by far the shortest of the four, Momaday returns to the style he used in “The Longhair.” In contrast to the first section, in which Abel’s fragmented memory emphasizes his dislocation, Francisco’s memories resonate with the rhythmic wholeness Abel discovers in ritual. Burying his grandfather according to tradition, joining the dawn runners, and, finally, intoning the Navajo Night Chant as he sprints across the desert, Abel discovers a way to articulate himself, to connect with something vital and meaningful: “He was running and under his breath he began to sing. There was no sound, and he had no voice; he had only the words of the song.”

The form of House Made of Dawn mirrors Abel’s engagement with ceremony, myth, and oral tradition. The text itself presents an alternative to Benally’s connection with the Night Chant. Unlike Benally, who treats the ceremony as a relic independent of and irrelevant to contemporary America, Momaday shows it can be incorporated into modernity. Opening and closing with identical images—Abel running—the narrative is circular. Momaday encourages us to reconsider simplistic notions of linear time, notions that Benally harbors when he wonders why anyone would want to live on the reservation, since that lifestyle had been “surpassed” by industrialization and consumerism. Momaday rejects this idea. Through memory, imagination, and ritual, the past comes to life, overlapping with the present and future. Time, like the narrative, is circular. Once Abel realizes this, he no longer feels alienated. He becomes a part of something much larger than his pain-filled present.

For Momaday, the oral tradition captures the potential of human imagination. Through an unending process of telling, listening, and retelling, oral forms adapt according to a culture’s present needs. The oral tradition connects listeners with a past, but the connection is dynamic rather than static. Momaday invokes the oral tradition with the novel’s first and last words: Dypolah and Qtsedaba are traditional signals Jemez storytellers use to open and close a mythical tale. With House Made of Dawn Momaday blends the modern novel and ancient oral customs; through his imagination, we witness Abel as he struggles to heal.

House Made of Dawn is an enigmatic narrative that renders the beauty and pain of the Native American experience. Drawn into a strange world of wondrous images and beautiful language, we take on the story. As we grapple with the novel’s time shifts, narrative breaks, omissions, and poetic language, we know Abel’s homesickness: the desire to be elsewhere in a world that demands conformity and denies difference, a world where hope lies in the not-so-distant horizon, where we, as does Abel, behold the breathtaking light of dawn.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Although a comic character, Tosamah tells the story of his Kiowa grandmother with reverence. The story mirrors the one Momaday tells of his own grandmother in the introduction to The Way to Rainy Mountain. Read the prologue and introduction of The Way to Rainy Mountain. How does this alter your interpretation of Tosamah? How does it change your idea of Momaday?

2. Using an encyclopedia and/or a reliable Web site, identify key passages in House Made of Dawn that allude to or quote the Night Chant and explain their significance to the novel, especially Abel’s healing process (the fourth day of the Night Chant, which Momaday uses in House Made of Dawn, can be found in a number of places, including online at http://www.sacred- texts.com/nam/nav/nmps/nmps06.htm). How does familiarity with the Night Chant deepen your understanding of House Made of Dawn?

3. Some readers have interpreted the albino as a symbolic representation of white society, concluding that House Made of Dawn portrays both as intrinsically evil. Most Momaday scholars, however, reject this reading as overly simplistic and misguided. Analyze the albino’s character, paying special attention to both the Santiago feast and murder scenes in “The Longhair.” What is the significance, if any, of the albino’s skin color? What do you think the novel says about American race relations?

4. In very different ways, House Made of Dawn and John Woo’s 2002 film Windtalkers explore Native American involvement in World War II. Watch the film, taking note of its portrayal Navajo soldiers. How does this representation compare with Abel’s experiences and memories? Why does Woo concentrate on the Navajos’ wartime heroics, while Momaday focuses on the years that follow?