Ceremony begins in 1945 as Tayo arrives home to New Mexico, a veteran of World War II. This postmodern narrative stories our protagonist’s journey in finding peace within himself, his family, and his community at the Laguna Pueblo reservation. Born from a white father and a Native American mother, Tayo’s complicated heritage makes him feel ashamed and alienated from the culture for which he grows up in; he is neither truly white, nor Laguna. By interweaving traditional Native American poetry into the prose of the novel, Leslie Marmon Silko is able to tell a powerful account of this man’s quest to defeat his “virulent afflictions” through a traditional ceremony. This ceremony helps Tayo to reach a resolution, one that rids him of both his despair…show more content… This something is his white identity and the death and decay that it is symbolic of in this novel. Our third-person, omniscient narrator says that they are “telling [us] the story she is thinking”, so are racially afflicted narration introduces metafiction from the very beginning (Silko 1). The construction of this story is now purely up to the omnipresent voice. Before the war broke out, there were still obvious race conflicts. Native Americans felt ashamed of their ancestry and heritage and were taught to emulate white society. And while Tayo’s hazel eyes remind him of his white heritage, combined with his dark skin, he feels confused and estranged. He had been taught that “only brown skinned people were thieves; white people didn’t steal, because they always had the money to buy whatever they wanted” (Silko 199). While it is clear this “lie” is contradictory of reality (considering white settlers stole land from the Indians), the idea that Natives are bad and white people will always be better than them is what splits Tayo’s identity down the middle. So when Silko introduces the “witchery”, a representation of unexplainable evils created by white people, our protagonist is able to realize “what the evil had done” to his home, the environment after the war, and ultimately himself (Silko 124). At first, people scoffed at the concept of “witchery”, but out narrator…show more content… But this novel uses the postmodern technique of metafiction in order to settle the stereotypes. Tayo’s lover, Ts’eh, says, “The end of the story. They want to change it” (Silko 231). She is talking about both literally trying to find the end of this story as a novel, and the end of Tayo’s ceremonial story. The violence and death of the white community slowly encompassed Tayo’s friend’s and home, and “If he had not known about their witchery, they might have fooled him” (Silko 250). If it weren’t for Betonie’s healing process, he would have fallen for his friends manipulative schemes. In the final chapters, Tayo is lured by his companion Emo into a Uranium mine where the plan was to kill him and his other friends. As this gruesome scene of a murderous Emo unfolds “the witchery had almost ended the story according to its plan” (Silko 253). Tayo fought with the idea of jamming the screwdriver in his hand into Emo’s skull, but then he would be fulfilling the “drunk Indian war veteran” stereotype just as the white people expect him to. He refrained form fulfilling the narrative expected of him, and metafiction explains this; it also gives him the ability to be a different person and finally break away from the violence set in by the witchery. Those who are wary of change are “fools”, as Night Swan puts it, and these are the types of people that create ignorant stereotypes
