Previous
Dialect
Section 1
Explanation and Analysis—Trauma:
Silko utilizes flashbacks throughout Ceremony's narrative as a device for characterizing Tayo's trauma. On account of his trauma, Tayo finds himself perpetually stuck in the past, forced to recall Rocky's death or other violent scenes from the war at the drop of a hat. Each of these moments of recall is triggered by something.
In the case of the following excerpt, from Section 1, Tayo sees Rocky in the face of a little boy at the train station:
The swelling was pushing against [Tayo's] 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.
The small boy in question was Japanese, likely bearing no distinct resemblance to Rocky. Nevertheless, Tayo cannot help but see Rocky in any child, his brain primed by recent loss and prominent memories to expect his cousin's presence, no matter the impossibility.
Explanation and Analysis—Death in Wartime:
In Section 1, Silko includes several flashbacks to Tayo's time serving in the US military during WWII. The following excerpt includes an example of situational irony from one such flashback:
[Rocky] rolled the body over with his boot and said, “Look, Tayo, look at the face,” and that was when Tayo started screaming because it wasn’t a Jap, it was Josiah, eyes shrinking back into the skull and all their shining black light glazed over by death. The sergeant had called for a medic and somebody rolled up Tayo’s sleeve; they told him to sleep, and the next day they all acted as though nothing had happened. They called it battle fatigue, and they said hallucinations were common with malarial fever.
Ironically, Tayo's response to the violence and depravity of war is actually pretty normal, despite the fact that he is the one who is hallucinating. All of the other soldiers, Rocky included, are detached from killing and readily willing to dehumanize Japanese soldiers. Through the juxtaposition of Tayo's response with that of his peers, Silko critiques the detached, unempathetic perspective that modern militaries require of their soldiers. The human response to cruelty, torture, and murder should be shock, disgust, and horror—no matter the identity, ethnicity, or nationality of the victim.
Related Themes:
