Tayo and His Journey to Entirety

Cowardice, shell shock, battle fatigue, combat stress reaction (CSR), war neurosis, acute stress reaction, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are merely a few titles describing the extreme psychological changes occurring in battle veterans enduring long periods of service as combat line troops since the advent of long-range artillery and rifle-fire. Native Americans were used and cast aside by a government responsible for taking their tribal lands and requesting of them to serve during World War II by means of the draft. Tayo’s achievement recreated within him a sense of purpose and a new connection with his mother’s people after purging his body of the horrors of war he experienced and by repairing the tear in Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought-Woman’s web tore by the destruction of the White Man’s conquest and his World War represented by his quest directed by the Shaman Betonie only then will he reconcile his past with the present and open the proverbial doors to his future.
A warped and twisted childhood: Tayo, the half-breed neither the people of his unknown father or the Laguna people of his mother wanted him—he represented the evil destruction brought upon the people of the desert by the greed of the white man; who took without any regard of the ‘mother’ raping and pillaging the earth destroying her off-spring to feed the armies of Mexican and white laborers taking from the land trees, minerals, and killing her animals. Tayo’s first years were horrible living in cardboard and tin shacks—when his mother was not selling her body and soul for a bottle of booze. “They found their own places to sleep because the men stayed until dawn. Before they knew how to walk, the children learned how to avoid fists and feet” (Silko, 100). ...

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...the plant of light; finally he entered the kiva and told the elders of the tribe of the story, a story not quite to the end. “It took a long time to tell them the story; they stopped him frequently with questions about the location and the time of day; they asked about the direction she had come from and the color of her eyes. It was while he was sitting there, facing the southeast, that he noticed how the four windows along the south wall of the kiva had a particular relationship to this late autumn position of the sun” (Silko, 238).
Tayo found peace with the completion of his portion of the story as he repaired the web; in doing so his tainted past was reconciled with his present and the future became brighter as he knew he would find her once again, Ts’eh of the hazel green eyes.

Works Cited

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. Penguin Books, London. 2006. Print.