Ceremony

In Section 1, Silko includes several flashbacks to Tayo's time serving in the US military during WWII. The following excerpt includes an example of situational irony from one such flashback:

[Rocky] rolled the body over with his boot and said, “Look, Tayo, look at the face,” and that was when Tayo started screaming because it wasn’t a Jap, it was Josiah, eyes shrinking back into the skull and all their shining black light glazed over by death. The sergeant had called for a medic and somebody rolled up Tayo’s sleeve; they told him to sleep, and the next day they all acted as though nothing had happened. They called it battle fatigue, and they said hallucinations were common with malarial fever.

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In Section 1, Tayo recalls his time serving in the Pacific theater during WWII. At the time, he had been desperate to stop the deluge of jungle rain stymieing his platoon's movements. In his distress, Tayo prayed for the rain to go away, cursing the jungle and its infinite dampness. This prayer later becomes an object of situational irony as drought sets in on the Laguna Pueblo reservation:

So [Tayo] had prayed the rain away, and for the sixth year it was dry; the grass turned yellow and it did not grow. Wherever he looked, Tayo could see the consequences of his praying; the gray mule grew gaunt, and the goat and kid had to wander farther and farther each day to find weeds or dry shrubs to eat.

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In Section 2, Tayo reflects on his relationship with Auntie, Rocky's mother. Auntie takes care of Tayo in the wake of his release from the veteran's hospital. This kindness is unfortunately tinged with derision, as Tayo acknowledges the situational irony of Auntie's caretaking:

[Auntie] had always watched [Tayo] more closely than Rocky, because Rocky had been her own son and it had been her duty to raise him. Those who measured life by counting the crosses would not count her sacrifices for Rocky the way they counted her sacrifices for her dead sister’s half-breed child.

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