Identity in House Made of Dawn
In 1969 N. Scott Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize for his phenomenal work, House Made of Dawn. The novel addresses the issue of identity, how it can be lost as well as recovered. Momaday offers insightful methods of recovering or attaining one's identity. Momaday once made the following now famous statement:
We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined (Owens, 93).
For Momaday, imagination is the key to identity, and it is this key that Momaday offers as a solution to the problem of
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The path to imagination and identity lies in those things that show us who we are, that heal and make us whole, and that promote order and reality. Throughout House Made of Dawn, two of Momaday's methods to attaining identity reveal themselves to be, on this same path, running and stories. These methods are not separate, but intermingle and cross over one another at different times. Ultimately, through the utilization of these methods, one can gain a sense of identity and the ability to imagine oneself. At the novel's ending, this is exactly what Abel does.
In the second paragraph of the prologue, Abel is running. The prologue begins with Abel running and ends with Abel running. The prologue, in a mythic time and place, tells the story, and how it will end, in accordance with traditional storytelling. (Owens, 96). We, the reader, know that Abel with find himself by the novel's end. However, what is important, is "the way the story is told" (Owens, 96). Thus, in finding running at the beginning and ending of the prologue, one can infer that running must be important to identity, because only when Abel has his sense of identity does he run. The portion of the novel following the prologue proves this to be true throughout. Owens says that for the Jemez Pueblo, the native community and culture in which the novel is set, "running can have serious ceremonial applications" and that
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We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined (Owens, 93).
Personal identity is significantly complicated to obtain. The actual reason behind this complication is that every person has a moment in life where he or she chooses to change his or her true self in order to be accepted in the surrounding society. Imagination holds a significant part in contributing to a person’s identity development. Alison Gopnik introduces her readers to counterfactuals and counterfactual thinking, in her essay ‘Possible Worlds: Why Do Children pretend?’ She writes, “Human beings don’t live in the real world. The real world is what actually happened in the past, is happening now, and will happen in the future” (Gopnik 163). With this she is trying say that we don’t live in a single world but live in multiple worlds. These
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Throughout House Made of Dawn Momaday forces the reader to see a clear distinction between how white people and Native Americans use language. Momaday calls it the written word, the white people’s word, and the spoken word, the Native American word. The white people’s spoken word is so rigidly focused on the fundamental meaning of each word that is lacks the imagery of the Native American word. It is like listening to a contract being read aloud.
"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in the camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never." (9)
“Yet the absence of the imagination had Itself to be imagined” (Stevens, Wallace 2014). Here, Stevens is desperately trying to convey the message that even though imagination was slipping at