The Construction of a National Identification in the Novel of N. Scott Momaday House Made of Dawn

Huda Kadhim Alwan

doi:10.36586/jcl.2.2021.0.44.0072

Abstract

The United States government allowed Native Americans to abandon their reservations in the 1950s and 1960s. The historical, social, and cultural backgrounds shaped the forms and themes of works by American Indian writers who urged people to refuse their culture's sense of shame. Moreover, their behavior corresponded with the restoration of individuals to their rituals after disappointment, loss of sense of life, and mental illness performed from the influence of mainstream American society. Among these writers, N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko participate in similar interest in portraying characters caught between indigenous beliefs and white mainstream standards. The construction of national identity in the first modernist Native American Novel, House Made of Dawn (1968) by N. Scott Momaday is tackled in this research. This novel illustrates the healing tale of a young Native American man who, after his return from military service in World War II, suffers from spiritual and psychological illness. The protagonist is isolated from his parents due to his traumatic experience of a foreign war and his problematic genealogy that stems from the orphanage. He is isolated from the land that offers his identity and his culture. In order to gain a consistent sense of identity with the aid of oral traditions and ancient ceremonials of Navajo and pueblo cultures, he begins a ritualistic journey that ultimately leads him to reintegrate with his people and culture. This research illustrates how the construction of national identity is a critical theme for American Indians and contemporary Native American authors.

Highlights

Momaday portrays the excruciating quest for identity in his first novel House Made of Dawn; The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) extends the typical and underlines the significance of Indian identity
House Made of Dawn reflects the lives of people, their role in a larger society, and how to narrate a contemporary indigenous experience in one way
Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969

Summary

Introduction

The work of Momaday represents the mixed and sometimes multiplied hybrid perspectives of the post-World War II period of American Indians. The work of Bhabha introduces a series of difficult concepts that are fundamental to post-colonial theory: hybridity, differentiation, mimicry, ambivalence These definitions explain methods in which colonized societies have countered the colonizer's control, a power that is never as healthy as it seems to be. Among the several critical principles in cultural critique, today is the "hybridity" of Homi K Bhabha, together with his other concepts like "sly civility" and "colonial non-sense" it had passed into the currency of theoretical discourse and has remained popular ever since, by the late 1990s. Hybridity can be seen as “a problematic of representation” related to identity: with recognition of thenewnessthat appears, what “begins its presencing”, a fresh and hybrid vision of oneself can evolve in the sense of identity creation (pp. 153, 154)

Discussion

Conclusion