The world that Silko creates in Ceremony is essentially a masculine one. Her story centers upon an Indian veteran named Tayo immediately after World War II. Crippled by more than his involvement in the war, his story (and Silko's novel) becomes an elaborate exorcism of the past, a purification rite of all the emotional tensions inflicted upon him since his childhood. As the narrative weaves in and out of the past and the present—juxtaposing scenes from Tayo's childhood and adolescence with the war and its aftermath—a pattern slowly begins to emerge. Tayo's angst, his feelings of emptiness and aloneness, are less the result of his war experience than they are of earlier events in his life …

The war becomes an incredibly enlightening experience for Tayo—as it did for so many American Indians. For a time, he represses the implications of what he has seen. One...