Ceremony

Ceremony was written in 1977 by Leslie Marmon Silko.  It focuses on the plight of half-white, half-Laguna main character named Tayo.  Tayo struggles the entire novel with finding himself, and finding his true culture.  He has a series of memories on a loop, that emerge and reappear later on.  Tayo has troubles with sickness and is a frequent vomiter.  He survived (for one) the Bataan Death March, and that and a lot of other stuff are messing with him.  Chiefly he believes that since he cursed off the rain in Southeast Asia, that he's cursed rain from his Laguna people.  Silko starts every "part" off with a laguna traditional story (some in interesting shapes, people/animals).  He has his friends (some will betray him), Harley, Leroy, EMO, and Pinkie.  His friends deal with the war chiefly by drinking a lot of alcohol and playing "make-believe" about how the U.S.A. feels about them.  betonie is a medicine man who really starts to help Tayo.  He tells him that they must complete a new ceremony.  Oh and white people destruction was started by witches.  Tayo meets a woman named Ts'eh (mountain) and he has sex with her.  She's actually nature and shes helps him more than anyone connect with nature. Emo is a pretty crappy person.  While tayo has been spending time with Ts'eh he's been telling everyone that he's crazy. He runs from the numerous white people looking for him and is fooled into trusting Harley and Leroy.
He hides in an abandoned mine watching Emo kill Harley.  Then he realizes that since he didn't kill Emo and spread the whiteness, that his ceremony is complete.

A couple really great quotes were: "The word he chose to express "fragile" was filled ith the intricacies of a continuing process, and with a strength inherent in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where early in the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of web."  I like this quote because it explains so much about how native peoples think, and how the novel is structured.  The memories appear out of order, with much of it appearing at the beginning stage almost like word vomit.  Gradually Tayo begins to straighten out chronologically all that has happened in his life.
Another really good quote was:  "Here they were, trying to bring back that old feeling, that feeling they belonged to America the way they felt during the war."   I really like this one, because it shows the Natives separation with  the United States around them.  But Silko takes it a lot deeper then that.  She believes that all these outside influences, be they American, White, Mexican, or Christian don't matter because they're all destructive; they're not Laguna.  The novel says that a person can be all of these things and still have Laguna faith (except maybe on her portrayal of Christianity, that I'm not so sure of).

The main theme of this novel is "finding oneself" in a world of misleading directions.  It can be hard to sort out the witchery from the natural order, the Laguna side, and Silko makes it clear that most Laguna peoples haven't really discovered who they are.