"House Made of Dawn"by N. Scott Momaday

He is still a part of the Indian culture, including the peyote ceremony, but he is in any case being corrupted by the neat culture, which leads him to drink hard and deteriorate morally and eldritchly. Despite Abel's many cultural, emotional, psychological and apparitional troubles, however, Momaday lets the contributor know that in that location is a guiding lot at consummation leading the young man toward repurchase. The base does this in two ways. First, Momaday establishes a context of nature in which Abel works out his problems and comes to at least the beginning of self-discovery and the peace treaty which such identity brings. Second, the author's lyrical style gives the subscriber the sense experience that there is a power behind the character's troubles which gives sense to what controlms analogous Abel's internal chaos.

Nevertheless, there is no certainty at the beginning of the arrest that the young man will indeed go away his pain. One candidate typifies Abel's conflicts with respect to the clash of cultures in which he lives. His grandfather is an elder in his tribe, and symbolizes the Indian culture. Abel in this scene arrives in drunken pain, ravaged by the destructive influences of the white culture:

The door swung open and Abel stepped heavily to the ground and reeled. He was drunk, and he fell against his grandfather and did not know him. His unfaltering lips hung loose and his eyes were half closed and rolling (9).

Momaday takes us through Abel's childhood and up

bringing, his not knowing who his father was, his mother dying fairly young, his grandfather's spiritual influence. Momaday fills the boy's childhood with portents of both trouble to come and the spiritual salvation to follow---the flight of eagles, hunting exploits, a frightening old fair sex said to be a witch, a wild dog, and the inquisitiveness of the wind: "Then he heard it, the thing itself. He knew even then that it was only the wind, but it was a unknown quantity sound than any he had ever known" (12). Momaday fills the book with such portents, symbolizing the deeper mysteries and wonders of deportment.

Abel, however, at all times rest at the center of the book, along with his conflicts with respect to the white and Indian cultures.

His fellow Indians have withstood the onslaught of centuries of white influence, and have well-kept their spiritual connection with their past and culture: "They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies, but have held onto their own, secret souls; and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming, a long outwaiting" (58).

Momaday makes his book matter to and layered with meaning by using various points of view, from Abel to the cleaning woman he cuts wood for, to the priest. By using such a technique, he allows us to see the conflicting forces at work in Abel's life, each character wanting something from him---from religious mutation to sex---and tearing him to pieces psychological, emotionally and spiritually in the process.

Here we see a woman who first uses a stereotyping image to find Abel, and then shows her capacity for appreciating in her way the beauty and enigma of an important Indian dance.

Momaday shows a deep respect for the reader in the way that his lyrical description of Abel's life couches that life in mystery and natural power, leaving it up to the reader to come up with an understanding of the character. It is a rare passing which speaks directly to the young man's own undisguised reflections on h
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