| House Made of Dawn (1968) by N. Scott Momaday is an extraordinarily complex novel that tells the story of a returning WWII veteran, Abel, trying to find his place in relation to the land and his home community, Jemez Pueblo. Written within the context of American Literature in general, the novel is largely developed in terms of symbols, structures and themes from Navajo, Pueblo and Kiowa oral traditions. In order to be able to read the difficult religious levels of the text, it is necessary to comprehend the culturally distinct Native American principles of aesthetics, cosmogony, metaphysics and epistemology that underlie the composition of the novel. Previous critical interpretations have centered on the sociological and psychological dimensions of the work, barely touching on the hermeneutically puzzling mythological traditions that unify the novel.; My research focuses on the symbolic matrix of the narrative structures from indigenous Southwestern oral traditions that Momaday incorporates and transforms into written literature. In particular, the Navajo and Pueblo mythical stories about twins and bears that are embedded in House Made of Dawn connect the human characters to sacred powers in the natural world and effect their healing or integration with land, community and cosmos. This dissertation significantly provides a model of interpretation for any contemporary Native American fiction through showing that an ethnographic and literary investigation of ritual and oral traditions discloses the fundamental categories of a people's historical and imaginative reality. |
