Identity in House Made of Dawn Essay -- House Made of Dawn Essays

Identity in mark make of Dawn In 1969 N. Scott Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize for his phenomenal work, House do of Dawn. The novel addresses the issue of identity, how it goat be lost as sound as recovered. Momaday offers insightful methods of recovering or attaining ones identity. Momaday once made the side by side(p) now famous statement We atomic number 18 what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined (Owens, 93). For Momaday, imagination is the come upon to identity, and it is this key that Momaday offers as a solution to the problem of identity in House Made of Dawn. Momadays protagonist, Abel, cannot imagine who he is. In chronicling Abels effort to regain his exponent to imagine, Momaday offers inextricably intertwined methods to regain ones imagination. The prologue of Hous e Made of Dawn begins with the countersignature Dypaloh. This word signals a shift into the Native American oral tradition. Traditionally, storytelling have clear responsibilities. According to Louis Owens in opposite Destinies, the responsibilities are to tell us who we are and where we come from, make us whole and heal us, to integrate us fully within the military personnel in which we live and make that world inhabitable, to compel order and reality (93). In defining the responsibilities of storytelling, Owens also gives a description of the identified individual, one who has a strong sense of identity and is fully self-imagined. The identified individual knows were he is from and where he is going. He is not fragmented, and k... ...motion. tally is perseverance. Running is believing that identity can be recovered. If Abel did not consider it possible to find his proper place, he would already by lost, stagnant, lull waiting. Running is action. Stories are al so action. They are inherently active in passing on important knowledge. A story that is not told, that is not related, can have no meaning. Stories show the proper order of reality. some(prenominal) running and stories are crucial elements in Abels recovering his identity. The things they represent, motion, perseverance, order, and knowledge, are crucial in anyones quest for identity, not just Native pots, but the people of the human race. Works Cited Momaday, N. Scott. House Made of Dawn. New York Harper and Row, 1968. Owens, Louis. Other Destinies. Univ. of Oklahoma Press Norman and London, 1992