The Native American novel House Made of Dawn … presents the failure of Christianity. Further, its mythic vision of existence becomes an alternative not only to Christianity but to modern civilization based on secular, technological structures. (p. 632)

Father Olguin reveals the inadequacies of Christianity for the Indian. Although attempting to live within the Indian community, he meets only with isolation and failure because he cannot understand the Indian…. Near the end of the novel, awakened from sleep by Abel's announcement that his grandfather is dead, Father Olguin can only complain about being disturbed. After Abel leaves, the priest illuminates the irrelevance of Christianity for the Indian by crying out after Abel in the darkness: "I can understand … I understand, do you hear?… I understand. Oh God. I understand—I understand!"… Olguin and his religion have never understood the Indian culture, and Christianity is but a futile cry.

Also in House Made of Dawn, a Native American, the Rev. J.B.B. Tosamah, Pastor and Priest of the Sun, is a more complex religious figure than Father Olguin. Living in Los Angeles among urban Indians, Tosamah represents the religious confidence man in his most subtle form: he is both critic and supporter of the white way; he is both priest and medicine man; he is both friend and foe. Ultimately, he is a religious sham, speaking the truth but never the whole truth. His full name reveals and hides him: he is "The Right Reverend John Big Bluff Tosamah." (pp. 632-33)

[Tosamah] tries to span two religions and cultures; neither Christian nor pagan, he remains isolated from himself and his tribal past.

A sacred vision emerges in the novel when Abel discovers himself and when … he returns home through his grandfather and his racial memory. His quest takes him through the typical monomythic pattern of descent and death, through "loneliness and fear,"… until he is able to return to the reservation and join the ancient religious ritual, the run against evil and death…. [He] will be able to accept his place in the universe and defeat the fear that has dominated his life.

Abel's fear arises from unconscious recognition of individual, racial, tribal, and religious extinction. He cannot see the continuity, the oneness of life, because of his fragmented existence…. Like the Bahkyush tribe, which was almost destroyed by marauders and then by the plagues, he makes a "journey along the edge of oblivion,"… a journey which takes him through the white man's war, a series of brief sexual encounters, prison, and finally near-death from a brutal beating by a Los Angeles policeman. Out of their suffering, the Bahkyush acquired a tragic sense, a "dignity and bearing" which made them holy, "medicine men … rainmakers and eagle hunters."… During the depth of his despair, close to extinction, Abel likewise discovers some religious truths and acquires a holy vision that returns him to himself and his tribal past.

His final vision results from pagan realities of which he has gradually become aware. During the feast of Santiago, which takes place in the Middle, "an ancient place,"… the sacred center, the "axis munde," Abel is forced to confront his fear, his enemy in the form of a huge, grotesque Albino. (p. 634)

[The resulting struggle between them] reenacts the spiritual confrontation between creative and destructive elements that has been going on forever. At the end of the battle, Abel appropriately kneels down to watch the white man die. During the later trial, when the white world disposes of Abel with "their language," Abel's defender, Father Olguin, speaks of the "psychology of witchcraft" and of "an act of imagination,"… unable to recognize the religious significance of Abel's act. Abel understands, however: "They must know that he would kill the white man again, if he had the chance, that there could be no hesitation whatsoever. For he would know what the white man was, and he would kill him if he could."… (p. 635)

Abel's quest also takes him back to a reverence for all existence and for the land which supports this existence. Elsewhere Momaday has written of modern America's need to come to accept the land, to develop an "American Land ethic … not only as it is revealed to us immediately through our senses, but also as it is perceived more truly in the long turn of seasons and of years. And we must come to moral terms." One of the major themes of House Made of Dawn is that the people will return in a new dawn to this ancient way, throwing off the invasion and conquests of the white people and their religious vision. The narrator speaks in the novel of a prehistoric civilization that "had gone out among the hills for a little while and would return; and then everything would be restored to an older age, and time would have returned upon itself and a bad dream of invasion and change would have been dissolved in an hour before the dawn…. In part, this explains the significance of the chant "House Made of Dawn" …: it is a prayer for a return, a rebirth of the old way. (pp. 635-36)

At the end of the novel, beside his grandfather's deathbed, [Abel] is for six mornings reminded of all that is; and within these six dawns of his grandfather's dying he is reunited with his individual, racial, and religious self. (pp. 636-37)

Finally, Abel's life blends with his grandfather's death, and he takes up the past and runs onward…. [As] Abel joins the ancient race against evil and death, he unites himself with his sacred past. He also completes the circle of the novel, which begins and ends with his running; he completes the circle of the history of the American continent, which began with this original pagan religion, survived the Christian polemics and onslaught, and now returns to its origin; and he completes the infinite circle itself, the circle of life which all ancient people recognized and accepted. With such knowledge, the reader recognizes that the running at the end of the novel, with Abel breathing a song, is both beginning and end. (p. 637)

[Momaday has] created a new romanticism, with a reverence for the land, a transcendent optimism, and a sense of mythic wholeness. [His] reverence for the land can be compared to the pastoral vision found in most mainstream American literature, but the two visions contain essential differences. In Norris's The Octopus, for example, the wheat remains, a symbol of the vitalistic force moving everything, but this vision of cyclically renewed life is unconvincing, overshadowed by the railroad's evil. (pp. 637-38)

[Many] white heroes fail or are unconvincing because their relationship to the land has been more fantasy than history and because they are conquerors and violators. Their vision must then remain either an anomaly or forlorn and tragic. This is even more true of modern Americans, whose experience as a nation, as Momaday has said, is a repudiation of the pastoral ideal, an uprooting of man from the land, and a consequent "psychic dislocation … in time and space." In contrast, Abel … can return and rediscover, because [he has] a land vision that preceded the white conquerors. Abel's grandfather, a farmer and holy man who lives by the organic calendar [is] … able to sustain the shock of civilization and technology and preserve and transmit the land vision that [he has] never violated as [an individual] or as a people. The bad dream of violation may not end, but Abel … can transcend the nightmare, and like the Bahkyush tribe, [he] can return to the land. (p. 638)

[Momaday is] willing to face the "silence of the transcendent" in the modern world. Rejecting the phenomonological limitation of writers like Beckett and Kafka, where the dissolution of the hero's quest is the form, [he creates] an optimistic fiction with the protagonist returning to wholeness and mythic vision and transcending the limitations of both society and time…. This quest can be contrasted with postmodern works like Pynchon's V, in which Herbert Stencil's quest is undercut by a denial of form and meaning in the universe, or with Gravity's Rainbow, in which the hundreds of characters, appearing and disappearing, deny the possibility of individual, personal transcendence. Abel's … pagan vision, however, is a way of viewing the world as a religious whole: it is belief. This sacred transcendence is also different from attempts at secular transcendence in novels like Humboldt's Gift or the popular Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. [Moreover, Momaday's novel is a form of rediscovery, an attempt] to return to the sacred art of storytelling and myth-making that is part of Indian oral tradition. [It is an attempt] to push the secular mode of modern fiction into the sacred mode, a faith and recognition in the power of the word which "comes from nothing into sound and meaning … [and] gives origin to all things."

This rediscovery of the land, of mythic vision, and of the sacred word offers modern America not only a kind of fiction seldom seen, but, if [Annette Kolodny in her The Lay of the Land] is correct in her analysis of America's failure to deal with the environment and in her assessment that the twentieth century demands a new pastoral vision offering "some means of understanding and altering the disastrous attitudes toward the physical setting that we have inherited from our national past," then perhaps the mythic vision and land ethic of those people our nation so brutally conquered are appropriate and even necessary at this time. (pp. 639-40)