From the Invisible to the Visible: An Analysis of Tayo’s Return in Ceremony

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.201214.614How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Native Indians, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony, Tayo, Identity, from the invisible to the visible

Abstract

Native Indians, as the minority in North America, have long been invisible to the American majority. Leslie Marmon Silko is an important writer rising in the early period of “The Native American Renaissance”, and Ceremony is the most formally familiar of her texts. The novel actually records the Native Indians’ journey toward home and identity. It narrates the story about a Native Indian veteran Tayo who suffers severely from what is called battle fatigue and later known as post-traumatic stress disorder. This paper is set to read Tayo’s predicament as not a physical health emergency, but a crisis for his loss of a precise identity. After a close reading of the novel, we find the reason that Tayo keeps vomiting and urinating is that he wants to purge out the war’s monstrous scene and the white people’s lie to him and his people. The Native Americans lost themselves gradually by imitating and melting into the white world because of these lies. When their traditional culture and life destroyed by the dominate white culture, the Native Indian people live as an invisible man. Lost in the war and the white world, Tayo “shifts and grows up” through the journey of returning to his family and the Indian Reservation, and eventually regains his identity and the significance of traditional Native Indian life.

Copyright

© 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Hongyan Du
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/12/16
TI  - From the Invisible to the Visible: An Analysis of Tayo’s Return in Ceremony
BT  - Proceedings of the 2020 3rd International Conference on Humanities Education and Social Sciences (ICHESS 2020)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 805
EP  - 809
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.201214.614
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.201214.614
ID  - Du2020
ER  -