The swelling was pushing against his throat, and he leaned against the brick wall and vomited into the big garbage can. The smell of his own vomit and the rotting garbage filled his head, and he retched until his stomach heaved in frantic dry spasms. He could still see the face of the little boy, looking back at him, smiling, and he tried to vomit that image from his head, because it was Rocky's smiling face from a long time before, when they were little kids together. He couldn't vomit any more, and the little face was still there, so he cried at how the world had come undone, how thousands of miles, high ocean waves and green jungles could not hold people in their place. Years and months had become weak, and people could push against them and wander back and forth in time. Maybe it had always been this way and he was only seeing it for the first time.
Here we see the fragility of Tayo's mental state after his return from war. He has been so weakened and traumatized by his experiences that he can barely control his reactions, or his own body; the violent vomiting mentioned here, for instance, is induced by nothing more than the sight of a few Japanese-American civilians at a train station. Silko, however, portrays Tayo's physical and metal weaknesses for an important thematic purpose. His suffering it pitiable on an individual level, but also allows reveals a broader insight about how "the world had come undone."
Belonging was drinking and laughing with the platoon, dancing with blond women, buying drinks for buddies born in Cleveland, Ohio. Tayo knew what they had been trying to do. They repeated the stories about good times in Oakland and San Diego; they repeated them like long medicine chants, the beer bottles pounding on the counter tops like drums.
This quotation serves to summarize Tayo's situation after returning from war, and to indicate a few of the unpleasant ironies that Tayo's life now entails. Now back in the Laguna community, the men of Tayo's generation tell stories to evoke a sense of "belonging," though now, they no longer "belong" either to the white society that now ignores them or among the more respectable Laguna residents who see the young men as outcasts. These young men have lost touch with tradition, dignity, and hard work. Yet in another irony, they replace meaningful traditions with empty stories and rituals that are their equivalent of "medicine chants" and ceremonial "drums."
Tayo sat down. He knew Emo meant what he said; Emo had hated him since the time they had been in grade school together, and the only reason for this hate was that Tayo was part white. But Tayo was used to it by now. Since he could remember, he had known Auntie's shame for what his mother had done, and Auntie's shame for him.
This excerpt establishes Tayo's thoughts, feelings, and personal alliances in an especially blunt manner. Emo is clearly defined as Tayo's enemy; later on, Emo will emerge as the book's prime antagonist, hunting Tayo down with the help of some other young men. However, some of the relationships in Ceremony are much more ambiguous. This quote highlights this fact too, by calling attention to the complex dynamic involving Auntie, Tayo, and Tayo's mother; whether or not Auntie has treated Tayo and his mother fairly, and whether Tayo's mother deserves sympathy or blame, are questions that readers must decide for themselves.
"I knew nothing of minutes or hours. There were changes I could feel; the boards of the dance floor began to let and listen. The creaking of the wood became a moan and a cry; my balance was precarious as if the floor were no longer level. And then I could feel something breaking under my feet, the heels of my dancing shoes sinking into something crushed dark until the balance and smoothness were restored once again to the dance floor." She looked up at Josiah and pulled a blue thread hanging from the sleeve of her dress.
Here, Silko departs from Tayo's perspective to consider the relationship between Josiah and the Night Swan. Yet this depiction of the Night Swan's experiences raises one of the central themes of Tayo's narrative: the idea that transformative, ceremonial experiences can still occur in modern and everyday contexts. Dancing was the Night Swan's profession, but dance still brought her a feeling of mystical timelessness and of communion with the personified dance floor.
Damp yellow sand choking him, filling his nostrils first, and then his eyes as he struggled against it, fought to keep his eyes open to see. Sand rippled and swirled in his dream, enclosing his head, yellow sand and shades filling his mouth until his body was full and still. He woke up crying in a shallow hole beside the clay bank where his mother had thrown an old quilt.
Here, Silko depicts a young, impoverished boy (presumably Tayo) who is haunted by an image of death. The "yellow sand" has an ominous symbolic importance in Ceremony: the boy had at one point discovered a murdered baby buried under yellow sand of just this sort, and now he dreams that he is suffering the same fate. This sand is not simply an embodiment of the boy's private fears of death, abandonment, and neglect. It is a vision of the vast and suffocating effects of extreme destitution, a force which has invaded the lives of Tayo, the baby, and countless other infants and children in the poorest Native American communities.
"There are stories about me," Betonie began in a quiet round voice. "Maybe you have heard some of them. They say I'm crazy. Sometimes they say worse things. But whatever they say, they don't forget me, even when I'm not here." Tayo was wary of his eyes. "That's right," Betonie said, "when I am gone off on the train, a hundred miles from here, those Navajos won't come near this hogan." He smoked for a while and stared at the circle of sunlight on the floor between them.
Although Ceremony often contrasts Native American tradition and modern lifestyles, the representatives of tradition are not as quaint or oblivious as one might expect. Betonie, an aging and imposing medicine man, is well aware that he is a subject of rumors, a man said to be "crazy." He does not, however, seem bothered by such talk; instead, he is confident that his traditional methods are effective. He is also secure in the knowledge that, whatever the people around him believe, he is an intelligent and well-traveled man who has no problems traveling "a hundred miles" to see the world.
He dreamed about the speckled cattle. They had seen him and they were scattering between juniper trees, through tall yellow grass, below the mesas near the dripping spring. Some of them had spotted calves that ran behind them, their bony rumps flashing white and disappearing into the trees. He tried to run after them, but it was no use without a horse. They were gone, running southwest again, toward the high, lone-standing mesa the people called Pa'to'ch.
The dream recounted in this quotation takes place in the course of Tayo's time with Betonie. In these images, the cattle keep running, eluding Tayo just as they had eluded Josiah before him. Negative connotations of this sort may seem to indicate that Tayo's recovery is questionable, that sanity and peace of mind are escaping him, as elusive as the cattle. Yet the opposite is true. If anything, the dream foreshadows the cattle's reappearance, without indicating their ultimate destination or Tayo's ultimate fate. With Betonie's guidance, Tayo does in fact recover the cattle.
He repeated the words as he remembered them, not sure if they were the right ones, but feeling they were right, feeling the instant of all the dawn was an event which in a single moment gathered all things together—the last stars, the mountaintops, the clouds, and the winds—celebrating this coming. The power of each day spilled over the hills in great silence. Sunrise. He ended the prayer with "sunrise" because he knew the Dawn people began and ended all their words with "sunrise."
In this quotation, Ceremony indicates the form and effect of a meaningful ceremony. Tayo is not sure that his ceremonial "prayer" is correct word-for-word, but faithfulness to exact wording seems to be a minor point. What is more important is the use of prayer and ceremony to heal oneself and appreciate the world of nature; accessing the therapeutic effects of ceremonies, rather than treating ceremonies as rigid and unchanging cultural relics, should be the priority.
Their days together had a gravity emanating from the mesas and arroyos, and it replaced the rhythm that had been interrupted so long ago; now the old memories were less than the constriction of a single throat muscle. She was with him again, a heartbeat unbroken where time subsided into dawn, and the sunset gave way to the stars, wheeling across the night. The breaking and crushing were gone, and the love pushed inside his chest, and when he cried now, it was because she loved him so much.
This quotation depicts a powerfully recovered version of Tayo: a man who appreciates nature, performs meaningful work tending Josiah's cattle, and has banished his worst memories. Part of Tayo's recuperation can be attributed to the influence of Ts'eh, a young woman who immerses him in the worlds of nature and tradition. Yet the "love" that Tayo feels is also something new to Silko's narrative. Previously, Tayo's contact with women involved fleeting connections (the Night Swan) and instances of casual, debauched sexuality (Helen Jean). Ts'eh offers him a form of eroticism that is both more spiritual and more enduring.
Old Grandma shook her head slowly, and closed her cloudy eyes again. "I guess I must be getting old," she said, "because these goings-on around Laguna don't get me excited now any more." She sighed, and laid her head back on the chair. "It seems like I already heard these stories before . . . the only thing is, the names sound different."
In drawing Ceremony to a close, Silko draws attention to one of the unexpected paradoxes of her subject matter. Much of what Tayo has witnessed can seem cataclysmic and unprecedented; the ravages of World War II were unlike anything that history had ever witnessed, and the young men of the Laguna community have fallen into a state of dissipation that seems alien to their elders. Nonetheless, Old Grandma ends Ceremony by indicating that what is going on is not in fact new; the names simply "sound different." This statement could be written off as the myopia of an old-fashioned and cynical person, but is perhaps best understood as a pointed judgment of human nature. Customs, people, and social structures may change, but human nature remains caught in consistent patterns of destruction.
