House Made of Dawn
N. Scott Momaday (1968)
“A Pueblo veteran returns from World War II unable to speak, unable to pray, unable to run with the dawn — and discovers that the land remembers what he has forgotten.”
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House Made of Dawn
N. Scott Momaday (1968) · 212pages · Contemporary / Native American Renaissance · 6 AP appearances
Summary
Abel, a young man from the Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico, returns from World War II shattered and silent. He cannot reintegrate into the ceremonial life of the pueblo or function in the white urban world of Los Angeles. After killing an albino man he perceives as evil, Abel is imprisoned, relocated, beaten nearly to death, and spiritually hollowed out. The novel traces his circular journey from the pueblo to prison to the city and back again, ending with Abel running at dawn in the landscape of his childhood — not healed, but running.
Why It Matters
House Made of Dawn is the founding text of the Native American Renaissance — the literary movement of the late 1960s through 1990s that brought indigenous voices into the American literary mainstream. Before Momaday, Native American literature existed largely as anthropological material or was fi...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: High formality in the Tosamah sermons and Night Chant passages; austere plainness in the narrative sections; conversational directness in Ben Benally's first-person narration. The registers correspond to different relationships with language itself — oral tradition vs. silence vs. adaptation.
Narrator: Third-person for most of the novel, shifting to first-person for Ben Benally's section. The third-person narrator is ...
Figurative Language: Deliberately low in the narrative sections
Historical Context
Post-World War II America, 1945-1952 — specifically the era of federal Indian termination and relocation policies: The novel is set during the period when federal policy was most aggressively attempting to dissolve tribal identity through relocation and termination. Abel's journey from the pueblo to Los Angeles...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- The novel opens and closes with Abel running at dawn. Why does Momaday use a circular structure rather than a linear one? What does the circle claim about time that a straight line cannot?
- Abel is nearly silent throughout the novel. Why does Momaday make his protagonist inarticulate? What does Abel's silence express that speech could not?
- Tosamah's sermon on the Gospel of John argues that 'In the beginning was the Word' was enough — that John should have stopped there. What is Tosamah claiming about the difference between indigenous oral tradition and Western literary culture?
- Momaday gives us almost nothing about Abel's actual war experience. Why is the war a silence at the novel's center rather than a narrated event?
- Angela St. John sees Abel as beautiful, primitive, and silent. How does Momaday show that her attraction to Abel is itself a form of colonialism?
Notable Quotes
“He was drunk. He had been drunk for several days, and he was dark and dingy-looking and smelled of drink.”
“The world was whole and clear, and the canyon was quiet.”
“In the beginning was the Word. The Truth made him free. And he went on. He said too much.”
Why Read This
Because this novel will fundamentally change how you think about the relationship between land and identity. Because the formal choices — the circular structure, the ceremonial language, the silence at the center — are inseparable from what Momada...