House Made of Dawn
N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn is built on the model provided by John Joseph Mathews' Sundown and D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded: mixed race Indian finds himself unable to fit in on the reservation or in white culture. Momaday adds to this formula the fact that his protagonist, Abel, is an American war veteran as well as a more experimental narrative structure.
Momaday's novel is important less because it breaks new ground thematically (it doesn't, really) than it is because of its status as the first novel by a Native American author to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize (and because it is seen as paving the way for the Native American literary boom that would follow) and because of its structural/formal experimentation. House Made of Dawn is not strictly linear and plays with stream of consciousness and native forms of expression. This experimentation is both the novel's strength and its weakness. It demands a close reading and attempts to break the narrative free of a more western approach to storytelling in favor of a mode of storytelling more appropriate to the Native American context; but in the shifting perspectives and nonlinear timeline, the characters can get lost. At no point in this novel did I feel I gained any real perspective into Abel (or into any of the other characters, for that matter). I remained at arm's length from each of them throughout. Abel's journey--from alienated returning vet to ex-con in the big city and back to the reservation, where he finds a sort of healing and begins to return to his people and a Native way of life--is one seen from a distance, not one felt. This echoes and illustrates the alienation that Abel must feel, but it also makes it difficult to care about anything that happens in the book.
Momaday's novel is important less because it breaks new ground thematically (it doesn't, really) than it is because of its status as the first novel by a Native American author to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize (and because it is seen as paving the way for the Native American literary boom that would follow) and because of its structural/formal experimentation. House Made of Dawn is not strictly linear and plays with stream of consciousness and native forms of expression. This experimentation is both the novel's strength and its weakness. It demands a close reading and attempts to break the narrative free of a more western approach to storytelling in favor of a mode of storytelling more appropriate to the Native American context; but in the shifting perspectives and nonlinear timeline, the characters can get lost. At no point in this novel did I feel I gained any real perspective into Abel (or into any of the other characters, for that matter). I remained at arm's length from each of them throughout. Abel's journey--from alienated returning vet to ex-con in the big city and back to the reservation, where he finds a sort of healing and begins to return to his people and a Native way of life--is one seen from a distance, not one felt. This echoes and illustrates the alienation that Abel must feel, but it also makes it difficult to care about anything that happens in the book.