House Made of Dawn portrays many different modes of storytelling, switching between perspectives and narrative voices, as well as featuring lengthy segments in which characters tell stories to each other. The narrator acknowledges that the book itself is telling a story by opening and closing the novel with traditional Jemez words that mark the beginning and end of stories. This establishes the value of stories in House Made of Dawn and the Native American cultures it describes: the novel’s events are not less important because they are fiction, and the stories that characters tell within this story are equally important. One chapter consists entirely of a sermon delivered by the priest Tosamah; in the sermon, he tells several stories, and he also explicitly emphasizes the importance of language and storytelling. Through this, he honors the oral storytelling tradition and describes his Kiowa grandmother’s reverence for words, contrasting it with the fact that, in his view, white people take words for granted. The book’s narrator adheres to this refusal to overuse words. The novel grants vivid descriptions to natural landscapes, but its descriptions of people and their motivations are left ambiguous. This ambiguity encourages readers to take responsibility for interpreting the story themselves, which in turn mirrors how characters within the novel must constantly work to interpret the various stories they hear and tell. The novel’s unorthodox narrative structure highlights that words and stories are complex, and that working to find meaning in them is a sacred act.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Storytelling ThemeTracker
Storytelling Quotes in House Made of Dawn
Dypaloh. There was a house made of dawn. It was made of pollen and of rain, and the land was very old and everlasting. There were many colors on the hills, and the plain was bright with different-colored clays and sands. Red and blue and spotted horses grazed in the plain, and there was a dark wilderness on the mountains beyond. The land was still and strong. It was beautiful all around.
Abel was running.
“And in his hurry he said too much. ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ It was the Truth, all right, but it was more than the Truth. The Truth was overgrown with fat, and the fat was God. The fat was John’s God, and God stood between John and the Truth. […] He had said all there was to say, everything, but he went on. ‘In the beginning was the word….’ Brothers and sisters, that was the Truth […]
[O]ld John was a white man, and the white man has his ways. […] He talks about the Word. He talks through it and around it. […] And in all of this he subtracts the Truth.’”
When he had told his story once, simply, Abel refused to speak. […] That was good, for he should not have known what more to say. Word by word by word these men were disposing of him in language, their language, and they were making a bad job of it.
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.
We went up there on the hill, him and me, with Tosamah and Cruz. There were a lot of Indians up there, and we really got going after a while. […] Somebody built a fire, and we heated the drums until they were good and you could really hear them. Mercedes Tenorio had some turtle shells and she started doing a stomp dance.
You can forget about everything up there. […] We could see one whole side of the city, all the way to the water, but we couldn’t hear anything down there. All we could hear was the drums and the singing.
He had begun at the wrong pace, another and better man’s pace, had seen the man come almost at once to the top of his strength, hitting his stride without effort […]. And like a fool he had taken up the bait, whole and at once, had allowed himself to be run into the ground. In the next instant his lungs should burst, for now they were burning with pain and the pain had crowded out the last and least element of his breath, and he should stumble and fall. But the moment passed […] and the next and the next, and he was running still, and still he could see the dark shape of the man running away […] like a motionless shadow. And he held onto the shadow and ran beyond his pain.
