Ceremony By Silcko Analysis

“Ceremony I will tell you something about stories, [he said] They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death. You don't have anything if you don't have the stories. Their evil is mighty but it can't stand up to our stories. So they try to destroy the stories let the stories be confused or forgotten. They would like that They would be happy because we would be defenseless then. He rubbed his belly. I keep them here” (Silcko, 5)
The above passage unravels the intention of the novel. The initial narrator didactically introduces readers to the influences of colonization. The novel is an experimental attempt at recovering the native’s identity in a postcolonial society.

It goes on to emphasize why their literature should be classified separately from American Literature. The reason the piece gives is because while both are written in English and may contain similar themes and ideas as seen in American novels, it is in fact not the same, it proposes distinct notions and ideas that will never be found in the average novel. And as such should be classified into a different category. He goes on to explain that the novel acts as an agent to interpreting the culture and their way of writing. What is more, Silko uses her novel to illustrate the importance of cultural preservation and it is also a tool of this concept that she presents. The article goes even further to say that the journey that Tayo is forced to take can be paralleled to Silko’s own journey, essentially saying that the novel is biographical in some aspects. While Tayo is one individual that appears to be the catalyst for change, Silko in writing the novel, is also a representation of this same change or transition. This transition is from distinct division between native culture and the American culture or identity to hybridism. What Tayo represents is not only the physical results of hybridity but he also contributes, through his journey to the mental and cultural dimensions to this important transition. “Silko revises the naturalistic code to show Tayo’s victory over it. Yet that naturalistic code has structured our experience of the novel for a long time, and that generic affiliation is therefore an important part of the book’s meaning.”(Dasenbrock, 78) Similarly, in writing the novel, Silko reconstructs the identity of the “storyteller” she uses the American’s English language and concept of a novel, to document oral traditions and within these tales she incorporates the story of transitioning