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House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday : Summary

 

The Longhair

In 1945, Abel's grandfather, Francisco, rides his horse-drawn wagon into town and picks up Abel from the bus station. The young man is returning from his service in the army during World War II. So drunk that he does not recognize his own grandfather, Abel slips off the bus and into his grandfather's wagon.

Waking the next day at Francisco's house, he recalls frightening images from his early life and wartime experiences.

The story shifts to Father Olguin, the Catholic missionary assigned to the reservation at Walatowa. He is visited by Angela St. John, a pregnant white woman from Los Angeles. She asks Father Olguin to recommend a local person looking for work who can chop wood for her. A few days later, Abel comes to her house. He chops the wood, but does not talk to her.

At the feast of Santiago, Abel participates in a competition that is based on a folk story about Santiago, who founded the town by sacrificing a rooster. The townspeople believe that the discarded feathers and blood of the rooster produced plants and animals from the ground. At the feast, contestants ride horses toward a rooster that is buried up to its neck in the ground, trying to reach down and pull it out. Abel does poorly at the competition. The winner is an albino on a black horse, who takes the rooster over to Abel and beats him with it.

A few days later, Abel walks to Angela St. John's house. She invites him in, gives him coffee, and asks if he would like to make love to her. He accepts, and the two become lovers. Father Olguin comes to talk to her about her sin a few days later, but she does not regret her actions.

After a festival in town, Abel sits in a bar and has a few drinks expecting albino to arrive. In the climactic moment of the first chapter, when Abel kills albino, who has previously taunted him at the feast of Santiago What they say
to each other is never revealed, we only know that Abel stabs albino and dies emotionless. Later he is sent to prison in Los Angeles.

 

The Priest of the Sun

Seven years later, the story shifts to Los Angeles. Reverend John Big Bluff Tosamah, the pastor of the Holiness Pan-Indian Rescue Mission known as the Priest of the Sun, preaches to Native Americans in the city. Tosamah is a Kiowa (north America near to Mexico and oklahoma), and he recalls stories told him by his grandmother. He passes these Indian stories along to those in his congregation, many of whom are from other native groups.

Abel has served his jail time for the murder of the albino. He is trying to start a new life in Los Angeles. Abel has a close friend, Benally, who is an Indian; Abel also has a girlfriend named Milly, who is the social worker assigned to his case. He struggles to stay out of trouble and survive in a white man's world.

 

The Night Chanter

Benally clarifies some of the details of Abel's life in Los Angeles. He is familiar with many of the members in the Native American community and mentions their names in the process of telling the story. He remembers that after his release from prison, Abel was brought to the factory where Benally worked. Benally gave him a place to live and went out to bars and to the beach with him.

One night they are stopped by Martinez, a local police officer. When Abel does not respond appropriately, Martinez hits his hands with his nightstick. He got seriously injured, soon he stops going to work, and spends his days drinking and wandering the streets.

He loses a succession of jobs, and eventually is attacked and beaten up on the street.

Benally contacts Angela St. John. She visits Abel in the hospital. Benally puts Abel on a bus back to the reservation.

 

The Dawn Runner

When he returns to the reservation, Abel discovers that his grandfather is dying. Abel listens to him murmuring in his delirium for six days about a bear hunt from his youth. The old man dies on the seventh morning.

Abel wakes Father Olguin before dawn and makes arrangements for the old man's funeral service. He takes off down the road south of town. When he spots the figures of men running, he strips off his shirt and runs after them.

 

 

Characters Analysis

 

Abel

The protagonist of the story, Abel is a Native American war veteran who struggles to find his space in the world. The story begins when Abel returns to the Walatowa reservation on a bus, so drunk that he can hardly stand or recognize where he is. Shortly after his return, Abel is hired by Angela St. John to chop wood. The two quickly start an affair. After being humiliated in a festival competition, Abel drinks in a bar with his chief rival, the albino. As they leave the bar, the albino takes a step toward him and Abel stabs him.

After spending seven years in jail for the murder, Abel moves to Los Angles. He takes a job at a factory and meets Benally, who becomes his friend. He also becomes romantically involved with Milly, the white social worker assigned to his case. Much of the story told in Los Angeles is interspersed with sights of Abel wandering around, severely injured from a beating, with his thumbs broken it does not explicitly say what happened (fragmentation).

In the end, Abel leaves the city and returns to the reservation. A week after his return, Francisco dies. After arranging his funeral, Abel goes running to the point of exhaustion.

 

 

 Albino

The albino (also called The White Man) is a mysterious but important person in this story. He is frequently called "the white man." At the feast of Santiago, the albino beats Abel in a competition, humiliating him. A week later, Abel drinks with the albino in a bar. They leave together, and Abel hallucinates that the man is turns into a snake. He takes out his knife and stabs the albino to death.

 

 

Ben Benally

Benally is a Native American man and a good friend to Abel. Raised on a reservation, Benally adapts the life in Los Angeles and appreciates the benefits of urban culture. He is sympathetic to the way life is on the reservation, but he also recognized the benefits of assimilation: "You know, you have to change. That's the only way you can live in a place like this. You have to forget about the way it was, how you grew up and all."

 

Francisco

Francisco is Abel's grandfather. A believer in the traditional ways, he is described as a "longhair." The novel opens with him trying to capture a sparrow so that he might have its feathers to use for ceremonial purposes. An elderly man, Francisco is mentioned in an old journal, written by Fray Nicholas. In the 1940s, when the novel begins, Francisco is a farmer working on the communal land owned by the reservation. Francisco was instrumental in raising Abel, and has been his only relative since his mother died when he was five. As such, he holds an important place in Abel's life and acts as a role model for the confused young man.

 

Martinez

Martinez is the brutal, sadistic police officer who traps Abel and Benally. He cracks his finger with his nightstick. It is that senseless and brutal act that alienates Abel from white civilization. 

 

Milly

A white social worker, Milly becomes Abel's girlfriend. Eventually, he drives her away with abusive behavior.

 

 

Father Olguin

Father Olguin is the Roman Catholic priest at the mission at Walatowa. He is a confused man, torn between the traditions of his religion and those of the society around him. He lives with a physical handicap as a result of a childhood illness.

Because of his unique position, Father Olguin functions as an intermediary between the outside culture and the people of the reservation. When Angela St. John arrives at Walatowa, she asks Father Olguin to help her hire an Indian worker.

A large part of the book is devoted to the pages that Father Olguin reads out of the diary of Fray Nicholas, a priest who was at the reservation in the 1870s. At the end of the novel, when Abel comes to him at dawn to arrange the funeral of his grandfather, Father Olguin does not hesitate to accept the responsibility, but he is disturbed that he has been waken up so early. 

 

Angela St. John

Angela is the white woman who comes to the reservation and ends up having an affair with Abel. Although she is pregnant, her husband never visits her at the reservation. Seven years after their affair, Abel sees her walk by on the street in California and tells Benally about her. After Abel is beaten and hospitalized, Benally contacts Angela, and she goes to visit him in the hospital. She explains that she has raised her son with an awareness of Indian culture, telling him a story about a bear and a maiden that resembles the story that runs through Francisco's mind as he is dying.

 

John Big Bluff Tosamah

A pastor of the Los Angeles Holiness known as the Priest of the Sun, Tosamah gives sermons on both Biblical stories and Indian folklore, often mixing the two. Like N. Scott Momaday, he is a Kiowa.

Tosamah has a vast knowledge of Indian folklore and Biblical stories, but he was raised in the city; therefore, his knowledge of the Indian ways is mostly theoretical. Tosamah expresses scornful admiration for the ways in which white society has controlled and obliterated the Indian.

 

 House Made of Dawn (1972) - IMDb

 

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger : Summary

 

The Catcher in the Rye begins when Holden Caulfield describes events that happened before Christmas. He was expelled from school, Holden spends his last Saturday on campus enduring a scolding from a teacher and interacting with fellow students. Holden clashes with his roommate, Stradlater, a senior, over Stradlater's treatment of Jane Gallagher, his girlfriend. Stradlater easily defeats the weaker Holden and gives him a bloody nose.

During the last days before his expulsion, he searches for an appropriate way to conclude his school experience, but he ends up getting so annoyed with his school and schoolmates that he leaves in the middle of the night on the next train to New York City. Arriving home a few days earlier than his parents expect him, he hangs out in the city to delay his arrival.

The first few chapters describe Holden's last days at Pencey Prep School in Agerstown, Pennsylvania. Advertisements portray Pencey as an elite school that grooms boys into sophisticated men, but Holden sees it as a place of nightmare.

 

The middle section of the novel deals with Holden's adventures in New York City. As soon as he arrives in New York, he looks for something to do, since it is too late to call his friends. He calls Faith Cavendish, a bar dancer recommended by a friend, but she does not want to meet a stranger so late. After a failed attempt to get a date with some girls in the hotel bar, he takes a cab to another bar. When he returns to his hotel, a pimp (brothel keeper) named Maurice sets him up with a prostitute named Sunny, but Holden is too nervous to do anything with her. He pays her and she leaves, but the next day Maurice assaults Holden when he refuses to pay more money, and Sunny steals the money from his wallet.

The next day Holden makes a date with Sally Hayes, whom he had dated in the past, to see a show. While waiting to meet her, he has breakfast with two nuns and buys a blues record for his sister. When he finally meets Sally, they go to a concert and go skating, but they eventually get into a fight and split up. After their fight, Holden meets an old classmate, Carl Luce, at the Wicker Bar, where they have a brief discussion until Holden gets drunk and starts asking inappropriately personal questions and he leaves. 

 

Holden Returns Home

The last part of the novel describes Holden's return to home. He sneaks into his house late at night in hopes of avoiding his parents. He successfully sneaks into the room where his sister sleeps, but luckily his parents were not there at home. At first, Phoebe is delighted to see Holden, but she gets upset when she realizes that he was expelled from the school again. She asks him the reasons, and he blames it on his terrible school. After listening to Holden's excuses, Phoebe criticizes him for being too pessimistic. Holden tries to deny this by explaining how he likes lots of things, but he was always haunted by a few incident : his dead brother Allie and a kid named James Castle who died at  school, and Phoebe. Later, Holden explains that he cannot imagine himself fitting into any of the roles that society expects him to perform, like growing up to be a lawyer or scientist. Instead, he can only imagine being a catcher in the rye (saves children from danger) who stands at the edge of a large rye field watching over and protecting little kids from danger.

Here, Salinger reveals the yet another face of Holden. However, Holden is not only a failure: he is also a deeply sensitive and compassionate person. After sneaking out of the house, Holden spends the night with his favorite teacher, Mr. Antolini, but he leaves early in the morning.

He finally decides to return home and face his parents. The novel never actually describes what happens next, the ending of the novel is enigmatic. But it suggests that Holden faces the dreadful confrontation with his parents and then later experiences some sort of nervous breakdown. The novel concludes with Holden looking back at all the people he has described and fondly remembering how he likes them despite their annoying and phony (dishonest or fake) qualities.

 

Holden’s final statement—“Don’t tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody”.

 

The Catcher in the Rye - Wikipedia

MEG- 11: American Novel Syllabus

SYLLABUS OUTLINE

 

(1) The Last of the Mohicans (1826)

 by James Fenimore Cooper
 
 

(2) Sister Carrie (1900)

 by Theodore Dreiser
 
 

(3) The Great Gatsby (1925)

 by F. Scott Fitzgerald
 
 

(3) Light in August (1932)

 by William Faulkner
 
 

(4) Black Spring (1936)

 by Henry Miller
 
 

(5) The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

 by J. D. Salinger
 
 
 

(6) The Floating Opera (1956)

 by John Barth
 
 

(7) House Made of Dawn (1968)

  by N. Scott Momaday
 
 
 

(8) The Color Purple (1982)

 by Alice Walker
 

Peacock and Nightingale By Robert Finch Summary and analysis

 

Peacock and Nightingale

             - By Robert finch

Look at the eyes look from my tail!
What other eyes could look so well?
A peacock asks a nightingale.

And how my feathers twist the sun!
Confess that no one, no, no one
Has ever seen such colour spun.

Who would not fall in ecstasy
Before the gemmed enamelry
Of ruby-topaz-sapphire me?

When my proud tail parades its fan,
You, little bird, are merely an
Anachronism in its van.

Let me advise that you be wise,
Avoid the vision of my eyes.
And then the nightingale replies. 

 ---------------------------------------------------------

 Summary:

Look at the eyes look from my tail!
What other eyes could look so well?
A peacock asks a nightingale.

At the outset of the poem a peacock expresses its vanity towards a nightingale by praising its own tail and eyes. And asks a rhetorical question ‘What other eyes could look so well?’.  The peacock is extremely proud to say that no other thing in this world is as pretty and attractive  as its tail and eyes. 

 

And how my feathers twist the sun!
Confess that no one, no, no one
Has ever seen such colour spun.

The peacock again asserts the fact that he is the most beautiful sight and a point of attraction. It can strikingly spread out its feathers. Even the sun feels jealous as he twists and turns its spectrum.

The peacock states that he can do wonder with his fascinating feathers. The sun rays intensify its charm or he even surpasses the sun in  its beauty. Nothing in the world can produce Such a magical colour combination.

 

Who would not fall in ecstasy
Before the gemmed enamelry
Of ruby-topaz-sapphire me?

The peacock affirms that it can captivate others as he in fact is the sight of ecstasy.  His body consists of different rare precious stones like Ruby, topaz and sapphire.

 

When my proud tail parades its fan,
You, little bird, are merely an
Anachronism in its van.

Here, the peacock degrades the nightingale by saying that when the  peacock spreads out its proud feathers like a fan, the nightingale would become insignificant. These lines evoke the nature of superiority as the peacock is comparatively huge in size and its eminence leads to dominate the poor little bird nightingale, even though it has an exceptional skill to sing.  

   

Let me advise that you be wise,
Avoid the vision of my eyes.
And then the nightingale replies.

In the concluding stanza, the peacock advises the nightingale to be wise and to avoid encounter with the peacock. Or peacock suggests that it is better to keep away from him. But the poem ends enigmatically when the nightingale begins to speak. However, the readers are not able to hear the nightingale’s reply. It may imply that it’s voice may be suppressed miserably.


  Critical analysis:

This poem is highly symbolic in the sense that it has a clear political overtone. At a glance it seems to be an imaginary conversation between two birds. Remarkably one is superior and another one is inferior. The size and the abilities also a matter of discussion.

The size of peacock is comparatively superior and it has the power and authority. whereas, the nightingale belongs to the minority group  as it is small and weak. Nightingale’s reply is silenced here. May be it represents the predicaments of the marginalized.

The poem 'Peacock and Nightingale' is an allegory as the Peacock represents the privileged or the elites. Whereas the  Nightingale represents the marginalized or all the voiceless people.

The sense  of colonial superiority also reflects in this poem. Peacock is the symbol of the coloniser (whites) and nightingale is the symbol of the colonised (blacks) or the subaltern. They can’t even speak out or produce a single sound. Their voice remains as unrecorded or deliberately ignored.

This rejected or unrecorded voice may represent the lack of proper history of the marginalized sections. Everything is in the hands of those who are in power. They decide the fate of others. Thus, the poem clearly marks the helplessness or the passive nature of the weaker sections in the society. The silence of the Nightingale powerfully sums up the central idea of the poem.

 Peacock with feathers (Photos Prints, Framed, Puzzles, Posters, Cards,  Canvas,...) #19927219