Abel searches throughout the story for a sense of connection. As a child, he loses his father, mother, and brother in rapid succession. After a sexual experience as a young man, the woman he has sex with teasingly runs away from him, laughing at his attempts to “get her back.” He similarly fails to form a meaningful connection with Angela St. John even after they begin a sexual relationship, as she is put off by his quiet and stoic nature. In addition to his isolation from the people around him, Abel feels distanced from his home and his people. He leaves the reservation as a young man to fight in World War II, which prevents him from coming of age as a member of his community. When he returns from the war, he tries to make a life for himself in Los Angeles, but he cannot connect to the people or the land there. The few relationships Abel does form are founded on a shared sense of isolation: he grows close to his social worker Milly when she realizes they are both “unspeakably lonely,” and he bonds with Ben Benally over their desire to return to their communities on their reservations. When Abel finally does return to the reservation, he looks out over the plains, taking in both the landscape and the farmers working in their fields, and he finally feels at home. The peace that Abel feels at home contrasts sharply with his constant agitation while away from the reservation, and it suggests that accepting one’s membership in an established community with a shared history can be an effective way to remedy loneliness.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Connection vs. Isolation ThemeTracker
Connection vs. Isolation Quotes in House Made of Dawn
[Abel’s] father was a Navajo, they said, or a Sia, or an Isleta, an outsider anyway, which made him and his mother and Vidal somehow foreign and strange. Francisco was the man of the family, but even […] the boy could sense his grandfather’s age, just as he knew that his mother was going to die of her illness. It was nothing he was told, but he knew it anyway and without understanding, as he knew already the motion of the sun and the seasons.
He made his way along the incline at the edge of the cultivated fields to the long row of foothills at the base of the red mesa. When the first breeze of the evening rose up in the shadow that fell across the hills, he sat down and looked out over the green and yellow blocks of farmland. He could see his grandfather, others, working below in the sunlit fields. The breeze was very faint, and it bore the scent of earth and grain; and for a moment everything was all right with him. He was at home.
And then they were ready, the two of them. They went out into the darkness and the rain. […] When they were midway between the river and the road, they stopped. […] All around was silence, save for the sound of the rain and the moan of the wind in the wires. Abel waited. The white man raised his arms, as if to embrace him, and came forward. But Abel had already taken hold of the knife, and he drew it. He leaned inside the white man’s arms and drove the blade up under the bones of the breast and across. […] [The white man] closed his hands upon Abel and drew him close.
“No test is completely valid,” she said. “Some are more valid than others.”
But Milly believed in tests, questions and answers, words on paper. She was a lot like Ben. She believed in Honor, Industry, the Second Chance, the Brotherhood of Man, the American Dream, and him––Abel; she believed in him. After a while he began to suspect as much […].
She had been in Los Angeles four years, and in all that time she had not talked to anyone. There were people all around; she knew them, worked with them––sometimes they would not leave her alone––but she did not talk to them, tell them anything that mattered in the least. […]
And then one day he was there by her door, waiting for her. It was a hot, humid afternoon and the streets were full of people when she walked home. And he was waiting for her. […] He was saying something, trying to tell her why he had come, and suddenly she realized how lonely they both were, how unspeakably lonely.
In the only possible way, perhaps, [Father Olguin] had come to terms with the town […]. To be sure, there was the matter of some old and final cleavage, of certain exclusion, the whole and subtle politics of estrangement, but that was easily put aside […]. That safety––that exclusive silence––was the sense of all his vows, certainly; it had been brought about by his own design, his act of renunciation, not the town’s. He had done well, by the town, after all. He had set an example of piety […].
He was running, and his body cracked open with pain, and he was running on. He was running and there was no reason to run but the running itself and the land and the dawn appearing. […] He saw the slim black bodies of the runners in the distance, gliding away without sound through the slanting light and the rain. […] His legs buckled and he fell in the snow. The rain fell around him in the snow and he saw his broken hands […]. And he got up and ran on. He was alone and running on. […] Pure exhaustion laid hold of his mind, and he could see at last without having to think. He could see the canyon and the mountains and the sky.
