Representing Native American Trauma through Literature: Leslie Marmon Silko‘s Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead as Postmodern Narratives of Mediation

Abstract

This thesis argues that Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead constitute compatible and interconnected messages of Native American presence and sovereignty and discusses Silko’s novels as narratives of mediation. I claim that both Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead mediate Native American trauma not only through their plots, the story they are telling, but also, and more importantly, through their narratives, the form through which the story is told. Therefore I set my reading of the novels in the context of postmodernism and post-colonialism. Moreover, I apply trauma and psychoanalysis theories to see how the unresolved Native American trauma of colonization is at the roots of Silko’s novels, and as such becomes the departure point for the argument in this thesis. Through her representation of trauma in Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead, Silko challenges the master narrative of Native American colonization in order to legitimize the experience of the colonized. Moreover, the two narratives reinvent the conventional Euro-American genre of the novel and become self-reflexive narratives providing instruction for their readers.