CRITICAL SUMMARY

As is evident from several of the early reviews, House Made of Dawn has often suffered from various misreadings. These misreadings are due in part to the novel's structural intricacy, its complex use of American Indian motifs and symbols, and its ambiguous ending. A prepublication review in Publisher's Weekly, for instance, claims that Abel “stalks and kills a white man who is for him the incarnation of evil.”¹ To suggest that the albino Abel kills is a white man (i.e., is non-Indian) is to miss the subtle clues Momaday has provided throughout the text, clues from the old priest's journal, for instance, that indicate the man's parents, date of birth, and unusual physical appearance at birth. Subsequent scholarship has approached and corrected several such issues beginning with the first critical interpretation of the novel in 1972.

The scholarship on House Made of Dawn has addressed these issues but has not, necessarily, answered all questions definitively. The novel remains open-ended enough to allow some critics to view Abel's final dawn run as a death ritual; others to see it as indicative of his healing and reintegration into his Pueblo culture. Studies of the Navajo, Pueblo, and Kiowa backgrounds of the novel have revealed many important themes and uses of symbol that have helped subsequent readers to better understand much of the formerly vague or mysterious allusions and to better appreciate Momaday's own sophisticated and carefully researched use of such background material.

Momaday's remarks in interviews about writing and understanding House Made of Dawn help the reader better understand the author's position in relation to the novel, which in some sense is like the reader's, that is, somewhat unclear or uncertain. About the character Tosamah, for example, Momaday writes that he is fascinated by him: “The character of Tosamah appeals to me in many ways. I enjoyed writing his part into the novel. He became a character who interested me immediately, and I still wonder a lot about him. He is intriguing to me.”² If the author himself is still curious about the meaning and role of a character, it is fair to expect readers and critics to disagree on definitive readings of the text. Literary critic Karl Kroeber, for instance, writes that Tosamah's sermons “are not integral to the development of” the novel.³ Other critics have argued that Tosamah's theory of language and the point he makes about his Kiowa ancestry are absolutely crucial to one's understanding and appreciating Abel's position in the novel. Debate over the meaning of Abel's dawn run is a case in point: is it clear evidence of his healing or is it a form of ritual suicide?

Given the novel's structural complexity it is not surprising that several critics have devoted their energies to summarizing and attempting to clarify the plot. Other critics have traced the rich and various Native American contexts the novel evokes and relies on. Momaday's incorporation of the landscape itself as a character has also elicited a body of criticism. Feminists have asked questions about the role and treatment of women in the novel. Larry Landrum summarizes one view of scholarship on the book: “For the most part, critical attention to the novel has evolved into an issue which opposes two kinds of claims: those tied to creative traditions of Euro-American art and the critical perspectives associated with them and those beginning with the question of the authenticity of Indian representation.”⁴ Several readers have attempted to place the novel within a modernist paradigm.

CRITICAL SURVEY

Critical reception and recognition of Momaday's House Made of Dawn begins with Marion Hylton's brief 1972 essay in Critique, “On a Trail of Pollen: Momaday's House Made of Dawn.” Although the article primarily offers a plot summary, the author does begin a critical trend of reading Abel's “real suffering and purgation” as beginning only “after he leaves prison and wanders to Los Angeles.”⁵ Subsequent readers challenge Hylton by considering Abel's sufferings and learning experiences from his youth and recorded as early as the “Longhair” section of the novel.

Another early critical analysis is Carole Oleson's “The Remembered Earth: Momaday's House Made of Dawn” (1973). Although Oleson touches on many of the issues that subsequent critics will continue to investigate, her primary contribution to scholarship on the novel is her contention that the landscape and the acknowledgment of the importance of the land itself are at the center of the book. Also important is her identification of Abel's journey as one of healing: “House Made of Dawn is a long prose poem about the earth, about the people who have long known how to love it, and who can survive as a people if they will cling to that knowledge.”⁶ Oleson provides a coherent summary of the novel, pausing to explicate certain symbols or images. She sees the episode with Angela and Abel as a war between the sexes and races, and according to Oleson, the albino stands for “White Man” in general. “The Priest of the Sun” section shows Abel at his lowest moment, but arguably he is on the road to recovery, even though, like the fish on the beach, he finds himself out of place in the city. John Big Bluff Tosamah, Priest of the Sun, carries in his very name a contradiction: he is both representative of the importance of the land (the bluff) and is a hypocrite, lost in the city. Milly's father is easily contrasted with Abel's grandfather: the former hating the land, the latter at peace on the land. Abel returns to hear his grandfather's stories, in which the land and a person's being right with the land play major roles. Thus, argues Oleson, the novel “is a story of human thought, action and emotion placed in the organic patterns of the earth, sun, and moon.”⁷

In N. Scott Momaday, a volume in the Western Writers pamphlet series (1973), Martha Scott Trimble touches briefly on several issues that later critics develop more fully: the effect of the novel's structure, the changing point of view, symbolism, the importance of language, and Momaday's presentation of both Indian and non-Indian traditions and lifestyles. Also important in Trimble's reading is her willingness to accept the open-ended quality of some aspects of the novel; in several instances, she argues, especially concerning Pueblo ritual, Momaday “presents the mystery that must remain.”⁸ She identifies the novel's theme of alienation, writing that the “novel is a complex, symbolic expression of how language and culture tend through their own territorial imperatives to encompass one, sometimes to a point of isolation.” She also insists that the novel—despite the grim picture it paints of relocation policies, for example—“transcends any Indian problem” and points the way to regeneration.⁹

Floyd C. Watkins devotes a chapter of his book In Time and Place: Some Origins of American Fiction (1977) to Momaday's novel. In addition to Momaday, Watkins devotes chapters to John Steinbeck, Margaret Mitchell, William Styron, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and Sinclair Lewis, thereby placing Momaday in a context with major canonized non-Indian writers. Watkins also provides a Pueblo context for several important motifs in the novel and addresses privacy issues concerning sacred traditions: in the eagle society; in the role of the snake and witchcraft, in the trial “as a vehicle for conveying the Indian's sense of mystery”; in albinoism; in running and racing; in hunting, especially the bear; and, finally, in the Feasts of Santiago and Porcingula.¹⁰ Watkins applauds the accuracy of Momaday's presentation of the cultural and physical landscapes of the novel and describes a context for the peyote ceremony and the Navajo “Night Chant,” arguing that Momaday has “followed more sources more carefully than any other modern writer.” Watkins maintains that the novel is “culturally as exact and true as the work of any modern novelist.” Indeed, suggests Watkins, “Momaday's novel … is the fullest and best representation in art of Indian culture that has yet been presented to the white man in all American history.”¹¹ Watkins's interest seems to be more in pointing out the many sources for the novel than making interpretative assessment, but he does say that “the tragedy of the book is that for Abel, as for modern Americans, place and culture are vanishing from their ken” and that “the novel is about man's loss of traditions, past, community, nature, fellow man, religion, even meaning.”¹² Watkins places Momaday's novel in the modernist tradition at the same time that he outlines its native sources.

In American Indian Fiction (1978) Charles R. Larson devotes half of his chapter “Rejection: The Reluctant Return” to Momaday's House Made of Dawn,” calling it “the most complex and the most obscure novel written by an American Indian.”¹³ In his discussion, Larson offers a summary of the plot, and then argues that meaning and structure are “irrevocably bound.” Indeed, according to Larson, “the novel should not be interpreted without reference” to Momaday's subsequent works, The Way to Rainy Mountain and The Names.¹⁴ Larson thus suggests that the reader must have a sense of the Kiowa cultural context in order to appreciate the novel. Most notable about Larson's reading of the novel, and in contrast to most (but not all) other readings, is that he sees in it “Momaday's vision of the American Indian [as] essentially pessimistic, that again and again he shows the reader Indians who are the last members of a dying race.”¹⁵ Larson reads the dawn run as Abel's “ritual suicide.” In fact, according to Larson, almost all of the Native American characters in the novel are “headed toward spiritual suicide.” Simply put, “Abel returns home in order to die.”¹⁶ Larson does concede, however, that there is some ambiguity in the novel's ending, asking whether it is “a positive return to one's roots or a kind of symbolic murder of the past.” Besides offering what he calls “the bleakest examples of cultural irreconcilability,” the book also constitutes the “most searing indictment of the white world by a Native American novelist.”¹⁷

In an overview titled Native American Literature (1985) Andrew Wiget devotes a few pages to Momaday's House Made of Dawn. Unlike Larson, Wiget maintains that the words and song rising out of Abel's heart during the dawn run signal “the beginning of Abel's regeneration,” demonstrating that the power of language is “one of Momaday's most enduring themes.”¹⁸ Wiget argues that the book is “more European in form and style and more urban in setting than any other Native American novel” and that the albino is the most enigmatic figure, one who “represents the impersonal malicious force of white power felt as prejudicial fate.”¹⁹

Bernard Hirsch offers a reading of the novel that focuses on the urban Indians' relationships with Abel. As suggested by the title, “Self-Hatred and Spiritual Corruption In House Made of Dawn (1983), Hirsch argues that “Martinez, Tosamah, and Ben have been spiritually corrupted by the white world, and they make Abel their scapegoat; he is both the victim of their hatred and the example to them of what they are not.” Martinez (whom Hirsch—alone among critics—argues is himself Native American) covets Anglo authority and so batters Abel's body. Tosamah ridicules the arrogance of white culture that stereotypes and oppresses and at the same time despises Abel for falling victim to those stereotypes. Ben has severely compromised himself in that he lies to himself (and Abel) about the benefits of life in Los Angeles and about the drawbacks of living on the land. All three characters, according to Hirsch, “share a single quality: self-contempt. … the very Indianness within them which they have been taught to hate is that which they intuitively love.”²⁰

Matthias Schubnell offers a careful reading of House Made of Dawn in his book-length study of Momaday. For Schubnell the thematic center of the novel is the search for identity; the novel is “a detached portrayal of the tragic consequences when identity cannot be formed or begins to disintegrate”; at the same time, however, the novel remains hopeful, argues Schubnell. Redemption does finally come, but it comes only when Abel “renews his attachment to his tribal heritage.”²¹ In making his case, Schubnell traces the conflicts that result from Abel's initial departure from the community, the young man's attempts to resolve his confusion, and his return to Jemez, which is a sort of “rite of passage.” In this context Abel's struggle is both universal and specific, both communal and individual. Abel's search is emblematic of any teenager's growing pains, but his failure also “reflects a crisis in Pueblo culture.”²² The adolescent's failure to accept traditional Pueblo culture—embodied in and articulated by Francisco—is specific to Abel. He is an outsider as a result of his parentage (he doesn't know who his father is, for example), and consequently he is unable to enter the traditional Pueblo way of life. Schubnell's example is the eagle hunt: Abel does not kill the eagle ritualistically; rather he kills her because he fails to appreciate or even understand the bird's tribal significance.

According to Schubnell, Abel enters “the world of modern America because the restrictive environment of his home impeded his growth toward personal identity.”²³ When he comes back to Jemez after the war, Abel tries to reenter the community, but he is unable to do so. He does not take part in the Bull Dance; he does not speak to his grandfather; and he is incapable—as evident from his encounter with Angela—of establishing a meaningful relationship. Most significantly, Abel kills the albino, an act that Schubnell attributes to his inability to deal with complexity and “the confusion he is subject to in his personal and cultural isolation.”²⁴ In addition to its alluding to Moby Dick, the encounter with the albino has a referent in Herman Melville's Billy Budd.²⁵

Schubnell traces Abel's rite of passage, arguing that the turning point of the novel comes when Abel is lying on the beach; there he finally comes to the realization that a meaningful existence must derive from the Indian world of his boyhood. Once he realizes this, he can begin to heal himself. There on the beach, beaten, bruised, and barely conscious, he finally “gains insights into the core of his native culture, insights which lead him to a new understanding.”²⁶ In the section “The Priest of the Sun” the structure itself reflects Abel's confused state of mind, and the symbols (fish, sea, moon, dying bird, and dawn runners) all help Abel recover, until finally he can use the fence (another symbol of his isolation and alienation) to pull himself up and begin the literal (as well as figurative) walk back home. As Schubnell puts it, Abel has a vision beside the sea, and the Night Chant continues the healing process. Ultimately, Abel's “running manifests an act of integration.”²⁷

Judith A. Antell also looks at the process of Abel's healing, but she finds the crucial salve in the “ancient power of the feminine principle.” In her 1988 essay, subtitled “Expressing the Feminine Principle through Male Alienation,” Antell argues that as an Indian himself, Momaday understands “that the power of the Indian woman comes automatically, by virtue of her femaleness, her personal association with blood, and her ability to give birth.” There are no contemporary Indian women in the novel, suggests Antell, and the women from the past are the ones who undertake the role of nurturer. Tosamah recalls his grandmother, but not his mother, for instance; and Abel's mother died when he was just a boy. Thus Abel and other male characters are estranged from the feminine principle. Even Abel's relationships with the non-Indian women, Angela and Milly, are finally unsatisfying. Antell concludes that through participating in the ancient rituals, however, Abel can “realize the feminine principle” upon which his return to wellness is based.²⁸

Kathleen Donovan is also interested in the female role in House Made of Dawn, but rather than likening the women to healers and keepers of tradition and ritual, she argues that the novel embraces an underlying sexism that detracts from its aesthetic merit. First published in 1994 and republished as a part of her book Feminist Readings of Native American Literature (1998), Donovan's argument, “A Menace Among the Words,” presents a feminist deconstruction of Momaday's novel. Unlike Susan Scarberry-García and Louis Owens, readers who find Angela an integral part of Abel's healing, Donovan argues that given Momaday's presentation of her character, “she will work in opposition to his healing” and that she thus represents the woman as a negative force. Donovan generalizes Angela's role to identify an underlying misogyny in the novel. Accordingly, Abel achieves his healing, gains his voice, but that restoration comes “at the expense of female voices.” It is as if the feminine, concludes Donovan, “must be denied or overcome in order for a male to achieve his healing.”²⁹

In his 1993 study of House Made of Dawn, Lawrence Evers refers to two important traditions as they relate to the novel: the Native American relationship with the land and the special regard for language. According to Evers, “A sense of place derives from the perception of a culturally imposed symbolic order on a particular physical topography.” From this landscape one draws strength and authority. Restoration and harmony for the Navajo come through “Chantway rituals,” argues Evers. Thus, the word becomes of fundamental importance not only in healing, but also in perceiving the landscape: “It is only through words that a man is able to express his relation to place.”³⁰ This cultural background, according to Evers, helps the reader appreciate the protagonist's dilemma: Abel is unable to articulate his thoughts, and he lacks any clear sense of where he belongs. His healing thus depends upon his gaining both voice and a sense of place. As Evers sees it, Angela and the albino both embody or symbolize alienation from the body and hence from place. Through Tosamah, who delivers the sermon on the word, Momaday lays the groundwork for Abel's appreciation of the language. Benally offers both the words and the sense of place from which Abel can begin to learn. Finally, Abel can recognize the importance of words as he listens to Francisco's stories. Through such mediation Abel is able to reenter the landscape. According to Evers, the race at the end of the novel expresses “the essential unity and harmony of man and the land.”³¹

In Landmarks of Healing (1990) Susan Scarberry-García has revised her 1986 dissertation into the first book-length study devoted exclusively to Momaday's novel. The premise of the study is that “healing constitutes both the matter and the mode of the novel's being.” She describes it as a “study of the Navajo, Pueblo, and Kiowa oral traditions that provide the symbols, structures, and themes of the healing patterns that Momaday has embedded” in the novel.³² This study provides a “multitribal mythic context” for the novel. In the introduction Scarberry-Garcia presents the context for the sources of healing, arguing that “healing … takes place as a result of the spiritual exertion of language on place.”³³ The second chapter presents Abel and his brother, Vidal, as symbolic twins who “represent a model of wholeness.” The fact of Abel's movement toward wholeness, in this context, demonstrates the power of the Navajo healing forces. Scarberry-García's third chapter is devoted to how animals, such as the bear, “provide symbolic models of transformation for the characters.” The study's final chapter suggests that the novel's structure corresponds to the order of the healing experience. The fragmentation “forces the reader to think imaginatively and to associate parts of the story holistically.”³⁴ Ultimately, suggests Scarberry-Garcia, Momaday's work provides “a means of reordering the world every time the novel is read.”³⁵

Complementing Scarberry-Garcia's reading of Momaday's use of Native traditions for healing, James Ruppert argues that Momaday's “mediation is not in eliminating the psychological underpinnings of the modern novel but in finding a way to make them serve Native purposes.” With a mediational approach Rupert explores how Native American texts “create a dynamic that brings differing cultural codes into confluence to reinforce and re-create the structures of human life.”³⁶ He argues that an implied non-Native reader of House Made of Dawn will find the modernism of the text familiar, but at the same time will “be ushered onto an unfamiliar plane, an oral one, or even a mythic one, thereby being led to assume a perspective closer to an oral Native epistemology.” In other words, Momaday uses a particular blending of Native and Western worldviews throughout the novel in order to initiate the non-Native reader, to help that reader better understand Abel and his community. As the novel validates the Native worldview, the reader comes to understand that Abel's “disorientation is less a social problem than a spiritual one.”³⁷

By the same token, the implied Native reader—that is, a reader who already understands something of (say) Navajo healing rituals—learns to better appreciate and understand the problems associated with relocation and termination polices of the 1950s. That Native reader also gains an appreciation of the importance of retaining and reviving Navajo tradition, for instance. Finally, both types of readers (and they are types as Ruppert uses them—implied Native and implied non-Native readers, not actual flesh and blood readers) begin to share the inter-cultural or bicultural world view of the (implied) author, and they thus begin “to be healed of their modern dislocation, their culture-locked perspectives.”³⁸ Ruppert thus contributes to scholarship on House Made of Dawn the argument that the novel serves as a means of healing not only for Abel but also for the reader. Ruppert thus sees the dawn run that frames the novel as a dual triumph, one for the reader as well as for Abel: “He has an identity, a mythic identity which readily fulfills Native expectations but also gives meaning to a non-Native sense of identity.”³⁹

In considering the healing effect of Abel's return to the reservation and his dawn run, several critics offer various interpretations. In a somewhat jargon-laden essay, John Scenters-Zapico argues that Abel's rehabilitation depends upon his ability “to internalize the communal nature of his people's customs and the integral role that the individual fulfills in them.”⁴⁰ Differing from Scenters-Zapico, Michael Raymond takes issue with critics such as Marion Willard Hylton, Lawrence J. Evers, Alan Velie, and Joseph Trimmer, all of whom maintain that Abel's salvation is due to his return to Jemez and to ceremonial life. Instead, Raymond posits that the novel “focuses on the pluralism of ordinary contemporary life and the possibility of finding meaning in it.”⁴¹ Raymond thus argues that Abel must integrate aspects of many cultures, both Indian and non-Indian, must “come to accept cultural diversity and learn the necessity of finding one's place within the larger context.”⁴² In a brief note in the Explicator, Charles Woodard suggests that Abel runs alone at dawn, that he merely imagines the other runners. Woodard's suggestion implies that Abel remains alienated from community however much he might accept the isolated ceremonial dawn run.⁴³ William Clements disagrees with Woodard, arguing that Abel runs in a literal, real race, an act that is at the same time “reflective of the deepest reality,” a mythic reality.⁴⁴

In his book Place and Vision: The Function of Landscape in Native American Fiction (1993) Robert M. Nelson devotes a long chapter to the role of the landscape in House Made of Dawn. According to Nelson, Abel's dislocation results not from exposure to white culture or from his experiences during the war, but from “his unwillingness to be held by the land, that is, his resistance to the snake spirit of the place.” Nelson argues that the snake spirit—the spirit that connects humans with the land—is fundamentally important in Southwestern culture, and Abel's avoidance is therefore a sign of his dislocation. Abel's early sighting of the two eagles and the snake is a case in point. The young man's interest is in the apparent superiority of the eagles. What Abel fails to recognize, argues Nelson, is that the snake medicine is as important to Jemez culture as eagle medicine: “The eagle holds the land whole and entire in its vision: eagle medicine is about possessing the land. Snake medicine is about being possessed by it, and Abel needs a good dose of this medicine to make his spirit whole.”⁴⁵ According to Nelson, the Albino, Angela, and Martinez are all snakelike, and Abel feels that they are a threat because he is unable to appreciate or recognize the snake medicine that they embody. As Abel finds out in Los Angles, his eagle vision alone is not enough to sustain him on foreign ground.⁴⁶ Although they are also displaced, Tosamah and Ben are able to offer models for healing: “Tosamah's original function in the novel is to provide us with an additional context for understanding Abel's disease.”⁴⁷ Tosamah's two sermons serve two very different purposes. The Saturday sermon helps explain the sickness that results from separation from the “Truth,” and the Sunday sermon suggests that the land, especially such sacred places as Devil's Tower and Rainy Mountain, has a healing power.

Nelson argues that Ben Benally, the Night Chanter, serves as a counterpart to the Priest of the Sun. Ben is also like Abel in that he is born on the land, feels a brotherhood with Abel, befriends him immediately, and, in a sense speaks, for him. Unlike Abel, he offers a vision of the land and recognizes the importance of the landscape. It is Ben who puts Abel on the bus to send him back to that landscape. Abel's choice of Francisco over Father Olguin when he returns to Jemez is an important choice because Olguin has spiritually abandoned the landscape, whereas Francisco continues to embrace it. Nelson has in common with most other critics his reading of the ending of the novel as emblematic of Abel's regeneration: “in his act of running he confirms the wholeness of the life of this place.” He has finally integrated the eagle and the snake medicine. Nelson concludes by arguing that the novel “seems to emphasize less the healing power of storytelling than it does the healing power of the land itself.”⁴⁸

In “Acts of the Imagination,” Louis Owens argues that with Momaday's book “the American Indian novel shows its ability to appropriate the discourse of the privileged center and make it ‘bear the burden’ of an ‘other’ world-view.”⁴⁹ In this regard Owens agrees with Ruppert, who reads the novel as one that mediates between two cultures. Like most other scholars, Owens maintains that the novel is one of healing: “The prologue tells us that Abel's quest will be complete and successful. … As in traditional storytelling we know the outcome at the beginning.”⁵⁰ The prologue also suggests that the completion of the quest will be fraught with difficulties. One of the major difficulties that Abel must overcome, according to Owens, is his misunderstanding of evil. In contrast to Francisco, who is able to acknowledge and let evil be, Abel confronts it, most notably, in his encounter with the albino, who “is meant to be identified with the serpent and evil.”⁵¹ In the final section, argues Owens, Abel “has completed his journey of initiation.”⁵² He is ultimately capable of hearing his dying grandfather's words. At the old man's death, it is clear that Abel has understood and can be regarded as healed.

In addition to Abel, Owens places Angela and Tosamah in this context of healing. Angela, like Abel, is “divided against herself” in that her spiritual and physical selves are alienated from one another.”⁵³ Owens argues that she too achieves a kind of reconciliation and learns to see; this healing is especially evident in her telling Abel the bear story in the hospital, a story that Ben immediately recognizes as similar to the Navajo stories his grandfather had told to him. Tosamah, who is both trickster and fraud, and who is also displaced, embodies a “dialogical tension.” He is a manipulator of words who on the one hand argues that words arise out of nothing, but who on the other hand accepts the view that humans are made of words, that only in words and language can humans have wholeness. Tosamah also has a tense relation with Abel. In comments that seem ironic, Tosamah seems almost to despise Abel for not capitalizing on the advantages the white culture provided. Yet, at the same time Tosamah envies Abel because “Abel has a center to which he can return,” a center that the Priest of the Sun lacks.⁵⁴

Also looking carefully at characters besides Abel, Jane P. Hafen argues that the three main Indian characters retain their tribal distinction, through which “each finds reconciliation by claiming his own specific tribal tradition and identity.”⁵⁵ She maintains that “Momaday never subordinates the individual tribe to a Pan-Indian communal whole.” An important part of the article is Hafen's careful look at historical interaction between the Navajo and the Pueblo. Despite centuries of mutual interchange between these tribes and the sharing between Ben (Navajo) and Abel (Pueblo) in the novel, “Pan-Indianism cannot rescue Abel, only his return to Jemez can produce the individuation within the tribal community that will give him a sense of identity.”⁵⁶

Susan Berry Brill de Ramírez argues that with Momaday's novel “essential and relational meaningfulness” is established through a characters ability to converse and to communicate with others through stories.⁵⁷ Such an approach allows the reader to note, for instance, Abel's “moments of interpersonal strength and wholeness.” In fact, Abel demonstrates the “conversive power of oral storytelling” when he conjoins the worlds of “tribal traditions and sacred rituals.”⁵⁸ According to de Ramírez, most other characters are also caught between two worlds: Tosamah, Father Olguin, Angela St. John, and Ben Bennally all struggle and are most secure, most whole, when they are in their own worlds, as de Ramírez puts it. Nonetheless, the reader is not to expect a straight-forward plot or a modernist resolution: “In a conversive listening-reading there is no expectation of a linear narrative that culminates in some final resolution. That is not how life really is.”⁵⁹ Offering resolution herself, however, de Ramírez suggests, as most other critics have, that Abel's dawn run signifies his healing: Abel “creates his own story through his prayer, and through the conversivity of his prayers, his words (unvocalized yet uttered) have the transformative power that is always a part of true storytelling.”⁶⁰ Here de Ramírez asserts that storytelling—the oral tradition—is an important player in Abel's final healing, a conclusion she is willing to posit. It is from a listening-reading perspective that the reader can best understand this important role, and it is through this reading that one can best obviate the difficulties of analysis and interpretation that result from other ways of reading, other more Western, traditional critical approaches.

The 1997 volume of QUERTY collects five essays and an interview on House Made of Dawn. The theme of the interview is that Abel represents a lost generation of Indian men who returned from the war and, in Momaday's words, becomes one of many “desperate young men who slowly destroyed themselves through violence or alcohol.”⁶¹ Robert Bennett sees the book as a demonstration that “Native Americans are less the victims of colonial history than they are the performers and creators of alternative histories passed down through alternative cultural traditions.”⁶² Susan Castillo suggests that the novel can be seen as “a sophisticated example of the richness of those literatures which are the product of ethnic diversity.⁶³ Indeed, the novel celebrates the rich diversity of Native American culture. Mireille Hardy highlights the centrality of the fish, which are first described at the beginning of the second section. She maintains that the literal fish are symbolic of the failed relocation program in general and of Abel's dislocation specifically.⁶⁴ Alan Velie considers Momaday's own identity as Kiowa, takes issue with Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's notion of Indianness, and looks closely “at the different sorts of genres Momaday incorporates in his work.”⁶⁵

Notes

1. Publisher's Weekly, 14 (1 April 1968), p. 34.

2. Wm. T. Morgan, Jr. “Landscapes: N. Scott Momaday,” in Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, edited by Matthais Schubnell (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1997), p. 50.

3. Karl Kroeber “Technology and Tribal Narrative,” in Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Literatures, edited by Gerald Vizenor (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), p. 21.

4. Larry Landrum, “The Shattered Modernism of Momaday's House Made of Dawn,” Modern Fiction Studies, 42.4 (1996): pp. 763-764.

5. Marion Hylton, “On a Trail of Pollen: Momaday's House Made of Dawn,” Critique 14.2 (1972): p. 63.

6. Carole Oleson's “The Remembered Earth: Momaday's House Made of Dawn” (South Dakota Review 11 (spring 1973): p. 60.

7. Ibid., p. 76.

8. Martha Scott Trimble, N. Scott Momaday (Boise: Boise State College, 1973), p. 24.

9. Ibid., pp. 26, 27.

10. Floyd C. Watkins, In Time and Place: Some Origins of American Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), p. 141.

11. Ibid., pp. 153, 170.

12. Ibid., pp. 158, 134.

13. Charles R. Larson devotes half of his chapter “Rejection: The Reluctant Return” in American Indian Fiction (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978), to Momaday's House Made of Dawn,” (See p. 78.)

14. Larson, p. 81.

15. Ibid., p. 93.

16. Ibid., pp. 79, 82, 84.

17. Ibid., pp. 94, 87.

18. Andrew Wiget, Native American Literature (Boston, Twayne, 1985), p. 85

19. Ibid., pp. 82, 85.

20. Bernard A. Hirsch, “Self-Hatred and Spiritual Corruption In House Made of Dawn,” Western American Literature, 17 (winter 1983): p. 320

21. Matthais Schubnell, N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), p. 100.

22. Ibid., pp. 101, 105.

23. Ibid., p. 113.

24. Ibid., p. 118.

25. See Schubnell, p. 122.

26. Ibid., p. 123.

27. Ibid., p. 138.

28. Judith A. Antell, “Momaday, Welch, and Silko: Expressing the Feminine Principle through Male Alienation,” American Indian Quarterly, 12.3 (1988): pp. 213, 215, 220.

29. Kathleen M. Donovan, Feminist Readings of Native American Literature: Coming to Voice (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), pp. 75, 98.

30. Lawrence Evers, “Words and Place,” in Critical Perspectives on Native American Fiction, edited by Richard Fleck (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1977), pp. 114, 116.

31. Ibid., p. 129.

32. Susan Scarberry-Garía, Landmarks of Healing: A Study of ‘House Made of Dawn’ (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990), p. 2.

33. Ibid., p. 5.

34. Ibid., pp. 14, 15, 16.

35. Ibid., p. 86.

36. James Ruppert, in Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), pp. 39, 3.

37. Ibid., pp. 38, 46.

38. Ibid., p. 50.

39. Ibid., p. 54.

40. John Scenters-Zapico, “Cross-Cultural Mediation: Language, Storytelling, History, and Self as Enthymematic Premises in the Novels of N. Scott Momaday,” American Indian Quarterly, 21 (summer 1997), p. 509.

41. Michael W. Raymond, “Tai-me, Christ, and the Machine: Affirmation through Mythic pluralism in House Made of Dawn,” Studies in American Fiction, 11.1 (spring 1983): p. 61.

42. Ibid., p. 70.

43. Charles Woodard, “Momaday's House Made of Dawn,” Explicator, 36.2 (1978): p. 28.

44. William M. Clements, “Momaday's House Made of Dawn,” Explicator, 41.1 (1982): p. 61.

45. Robert M. Nelson, Place and Vision: The Function of Landscape in Native American Fiction (New York: Lang, 1993), pp. 48, 55.

46. Ibid., p. 67.

47. Ibid., p. 69.

48. Ibid., pp. 88, 89.

49. Louis Owens, Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1992), p. 95.

50. Ibid., p. 96.

51. Ibid., p. 105.

52. Ibid., p. 116.

53. Ibid., p. 105.

54. Ibid., pp. 111, 112.

55. Jane P. Hafen, “Pan-Indianism and Tribal Sovereignties in House Made of Dawn,” Western American Literature, 34 (spring 1999): p. 7.

56. Ibid., pp. 8, 14.

57. Susan Berry Brill de Ramírez, “Semiotic Significance, Conversive Meaning, and N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn,” in Contemporary American Indian Literatures and the Oral Tradition (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996), p. 53.

58. Ibid., pp. 54, 55.

59. Ibid., p. 61.

60. Ibid., p. 63.

61. Joelle Rostkowski, “Looking Back: House Made of Dawn as the Portrait of a Lost Generation,” QUERTY, 7 (1997): p. 145.

62. Robert Bennett, “The Artist as Shaman,” QUERTY, 7 (1997): p. 151.

63. Susan Castillo, “Naming into Being,” QUERTY, 7 (1997): p. 166.

64. See Mireille Hardy, “‘A Small Silversided Fish’: From Relocation to Dislocation in House Made of Dawn,” QUERTY, 7 (1997): pp. 167-173.

65. Alan Velie, “Identity and Genre in House Made of Dawn,” QUERTY, 7 (1997): p. 176.