Blooms Literary Themes - THE TRICKSTER.pdf - ymerleksi - home

HOUSE MADE OF DAWN
(N. SCOTT MOMADAY)
,.
“Th e Trickster Discourse of House Made of Dawn”
by Susan R. Bowers, Susquehanna University
N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, the novel that inaugurated
the Native American literary renaissance and helped force
scholars and other readers to take Native American literature seriously,
turned 40 in 2008. Th e novel’s use of “trickster energy” allowed
Momaday both to draw attention to the boundaries between cultures
and to show how individuals caught in the no-man’s-land can fi nd
their way.
Abel, the protagonist of House Made of Dawn, is a member of
a tiny pueblo modeled on Jemez, New Mexico, the village where
Momaday grew up. We fi rst meet him returning home from World
War II so inebriated that he staggers off the bus and cannot recognize
the grandfather who raised him. Abel is so far removed from his tribal
upbringing that he misreads a man’s ritual behavior toward him and
murders him. After serving his prison term, he is relocated to Los
Angeles, where he fi nds a community of displaced Native Americans,
but nonetheless is profoundly alienated. When he returns home again
after a deadly beating, he discovers that his grandfather is dying.
Abel cannot re-enter tribal society because his experiences outside
the tribe—in the war and later in prison and Los Angeles—have
so estranged him from its relationships and practices. But his tribal
upbringing also renders him incapable of joining the majority culture,
so that he becomes the quintessential outsider, wandering in the
liminal space of the in-between.
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