Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in House Made of Dawn, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Home, Belonging, and Identity
Nature
Religion, Ceremony, and Tradition
Storytelling
Connection vs. Isolation
Summary
Analysis
At the feast of Santiago, Father Olguin tells a story about Santiago. In the story, Santiago disguises himself as a peasant and saves the lives of an elderly couple who offer him hospitality. They kill and cook their only rooster to thank him. Later, Santiago wins the hand of a princess in a tournament, but the king dislikes Santiago and orders him killed. The rooster emerges from Santiago’s mouth and warns him of the king’s order, and Santiago defeats the royal soldiers. At the end of his travels, he sacrifices his horse and the rooster to create cultivated plants and domestic animals for the Pueblo people.
The plot of the novel pauses for Father Olguin to tell the story of Santiago. Decentering the plot for a seemingly minor sermon highlights the importance the novel grants to all stories and to the act of storytelling itself. Father Olguin’s description of Santiago is also striking in that it reflects the history and legends of the Pueblo people as well as Catholic legends. This element of the story demonstrates how Catholicism has blended with native religions in the pueblos.
Themes
Later that afternoon, Father Olguin walks through Walatowa with Angela. He stops to talk to some townspeople, and Angela moves on without him. She appreciates the strong and varied scents of the village, and she follows the sound of drumming to the Middle, an ancient ceremonial area in the center of Walatowa. Father Olguin joins her, and they watch the ceremony begin. Several men and boys ride into the Middle on horseback, and Angela recognizes Abel among them. Another rider is a large albino man in dark glasses. The men compete to pull a rooster from where it is buried in a hole in the ground, and Angela is frustrated at Abel’s lack of grace in his attempts. She deceives him with a smile as he passes her.
The Middle’s location in the center of the town displays the care and respect that the people of Walatowa feel for their ceremonies. The fact that the Middle has remained the central point in the town also reflects the importance of tradition in the ceremonies and in the way of life in Walatowa. Abel continues to annoy Angela with his lack of guile and grace; manipulation and deception come easily to her, while Abel is consistently straightforward and honest.
Themes
The albino man grabs the rooster, and as he passes Angela, she is disgusted by his ugliness. Once he has the rooster, the other men wait for the winner to choose one of them. He chooses Abel, trapping Abel’s horse against the wall and beating Abel bloody with the body of the rooster. When the albino man drops the rooster’s dead body, the townswomen throw water on it as a sacrifice. The experience exhausts Angela. She feels emotionally drained and like she’s been sacrificed, which reminds her of reminds her of the first time she had sex.
The ceremony becomes violent once the albino man seizes the rooster. This display of ritual violence and Angela’s disgust at his appearance are the only pieces of concrete characterization the story offers for the albino man, leaving his motivations largely a mystery. The ceremony itself is emotionally taxing on its audience, and Angela’s response reveals that despite her lust for Abel and her desire to dominate him, she bears some trauma surrounding sex.
Themes
Late that night, a sleepless Father Olguin, dressed in a sweatshirt, smokes some cigarettes and reads a journal from 1874 written by a priest called Nicolás. Most of the rest of the chapter consists of these journal entries. On November 16th, he writes about his persistent cough and two brothers, Viviano and Francisco, who cause trouble at church. The next day, he briefly paraphrases a Biblical verse about gift-giving. In following entries, he speaks to God about his illness and mentions visiting an old woman on her deathbed. The old woman dies, and when he attends her funeral, he is displeased that her family and community follow traditional burial rites. Nicolás also notes that despite their mischief, he believes Viviano and Francisco to be good and pious altar boys.
Father Olguin’s casual dress and fondness for cigarettes humanizes him, depicting the priest as an ordinary man instead of a holy, unapproachable figure. Nicolás is also a simple human man, prejudiced against the traditions of the Pueblo people and struggling to control his altar boys. The fact that a younger Francisco served as an altar boy explains his continued devotion to the Church as an old man. The chapter’s shift to Nicolas’s point of view as Father Olguin reads the journal is also another moment in which the story subverts standard, single-perspective storytelling.
Themes
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On Christmas Day, Nicolás writes about the Christmas Mass and the logistical difficulties of obtaining a statue of an infant Jesus. He also complains about the chanting and drumming outside the church and hopes Francisco will come by. The next entry is from January 5th the following year. Upon Nicolás’s return from a missionary trip to Cuba, he hears that an albino child named Juan Reyes Fragua has been born in the village. Nicolás advises the parents to baptize the baby as soon as possible. Meanwhile, Nicolás’s illness continues to worsen.
The story continues to portray Nicolás as an ordinary man with mundane concerns like acquiring an appropriate statue for Christmas. The albino baby Juan Reyes Fragua is most likely the same albino man Abel encountered during the ceremony; if this is the case, this journal entry is the only time the albino man is ever referred to by name, another way in which the story refuses to share Fragua’s perspective with the reader.
Themes
Father Olguin reads a letter written from Nicolás to Nicolás’s brother in October 1888. Nicolás thanks his brother for his gift of books and reflects on the death that approaches as his health deteriorates. He tells his brother that Francisco has betrayed him by continuing to practice his people’s traditional religion, which Nicolás equates with Satanism. Nicolás is personally wounded by this betrayal. He relates a time when a young Francisco fell into the river and Nicolás had the boy stand naked by the fire to warm up. The tone of the letter grows increasingly unhinged as Nicolás accuses his brother’s wife of turning his brother against Nicolás. He closes the letter with long, rambling ponderings on God.
Nicolás’s hatred of Indigenous religions becomes clearer in his letter to his brother. He holds the traditional colonialist view that non-European religions are akin to devil worship, and this belief renders Nicolás horrified at Francisco’s continued loyalty to his native religion. His distrust of Indigenous religions is strengthened by his growing paranoia. As Nicolás’s mental state worsens, he reveals the extent of his attachment to Francisco, and his anecdote about forcing the boy to stand naked hints at potential abuse.
Themes
Father Olguin finishes reading. He takes comfort in associating himself with the holy Nicolás. He goes back to sleep, but he has a deformed eye that doesn’t close properly. At the Benevides house, Angela returns home. The house seems to her “a black organic mass” birthed from the canyon, rather than a man-made construct. She no longer sees the house as a place she is visiting, but instead as her dominion for the foreseeable future. She feels that the house, like her, carries secrets.
Despite the instability Nicolás displays towards the end of his life, Father Olguin still considers his predecessor a holy man whom he should emulate. Angela has thus far lacked the reverence for and trust in nature that the Native American characters share, but as she comes to see the Benevides house as “organic,” she feels more at peace in the house and recognizes it as its own entity.
Themes
