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  • Essay / Analysis of the novels “Pushing The Bear” and House Made of Dawn” by Diane Glancy and N. Scott Momaday

    Pushing the Bear and House Made of Dawn: interpretation of the fragmented works of Diane Glancy and N. Scott MomadaySay no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Diane Glancy and N. Scott Momaday are Native American authors who both apply fragmentation and multiperspectivism in their works, Pushing the. Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears and House Made of Dawn, respectively. These techniques, although applied in a similar way, give different results, both in terms of the narrative structure of the texts and on the characters of the novels. During the winter of 1838 and 1839, between 11,000 and 13,000 Cherokees marched for four months into what is now Oklahoma, “Indian Territory.” But this new land was not Indian Territory, and the Cherokee people were placed here against their will thanks to the numerous treaties that preceded the march, which was both a genocidal act and a forced erasure of hope and of the relationship between the Cherokee and their land. an essential element of an agrarian people. Throughout her novel, Glancy makes tangible the disambiguation felt by the Cherokee people by applying narrative tactics to viscerally convey them to the reader—fragmentation, dislocation, unfamiliar language, and isolation are all effects of Follow Those Who are forced to endure it, and all are employed by Glancy for readers to experience. Glancy frequently incorporates words and elements from the Cherokee syllabary throughout Pushing the Bear, but rather than providing line-by-line translations, leaves only an alphabetical glossary. at the very end of the novel, challenging readers with a constant choice: either ignore the words completely, leave dialogue gaps unexplained, or register the unfamiliar language as its own presence. The Cherokee language present in the story is a form like the characters who speak it, both tangible and ephemeral, seen but not heard. It is a form of written expression intended to be spoken, something that cannot be reduced to an English equivalent. These abrupt disjunctions due to unfamiliarity with the language presented in the novel are deliberate and reflect the dislocation of the characters and the way in which Trail acted as its own source of cultural fragmentation. This is put to good use midway through the novel, when Glancy uses a song written entirely in the Cherokee language, with only the title offering any kind of translation, "The Song We Sang on the Trail of Blood" (Glancy, Pushing the Bear 129). This scene is intended to highlight the comfort of language for Knowbowtie and others engaged in the song, as well as to create dissonance between the text and the reader. Attention is drawn to a language that was flourishing and inherent to the Cherokee peoples, and is now a series of unfamiliar runes that the reader ignores without ever knowing their meaning. Knowbowtie comments: “Sometimes I could hear the singing in the night with the wind. Sometimes I heard it during the day when I was walking, my arm bent as if I was carrying my rifle. I looked around me. Yes, I saw the mouths move” (Glancy, 128). Language permeates every aspect of what the Cherokee hold dear, a constant reminder of where they came from and what they have lost. Much attention is paid to the clash between the spoken word and the written tradition: the Great Spirit created the world with his voice, and the white man prevailed with his written treatises. The written word therefore poses a direct threat to the oral traditions that constitute much of Cherokee culture. ThereVannière is the embodiment of this idea: a character created to communicate respect for the story and important or oral tradition. She creates new stories about the Trail, despite the immediate rejection of them by those around her. During an altercation, The Basket Maker attempts to tell a story: “…But I say the idea for the baskets came from our stories. The baskets contain fish, corn and beans. Just like our stories have meaning. Yes, I say the baskets copy our stories” (Glancy, 153). She is then interrupted by a woman, who tells her that she "can't make up stories on her own" and that she "leaves [the lead] unspoken." When The Basketmaker argues further, the woman states that “the spirits gave us the stories. When they were still talking to us. I think they're mad at us now. Why else would we take the trail? » (Glancy, 154). Many fear that uprooting their people from their lands will sever their spiritual connections to their culture, their stories, and even their ability to conceive new stories. Through The Basket Maker, Glancy creates hope for the characters that through the continued use of their oral traditions and their ability to craft new stories, their history will not be lost and the lives of people lost on the track will not be forgotten. , but will be passed on to future generations. Like Glancy, Momaday skillfully uses fragmented narratives to reflect the internal struggles of his characters in House Made of Dawn. Momaday's themes of hybridity, self-determination, and the importance of storytelling come into play as Abel, a recently returned Pueblo native scarred by World War II, struggles to heal from both his culture indigenous and the wastelands of modern America. The novel's relationships to crises of faith and lack of sovereignty are highlighted by Momaday's employment of sharply contrasting characters, whose opposing perspectives and life experiences often have existential and violent ends. House Made of Dawn is set in a time of literal upheaval and uprooting. of indigenous peoples and cultures, when Termination and Relocation attempted to forcibly end tribal affiliation by removing indigenous men from reservations and settling them in modern cities to "civilize" them. The broken and fragmented narrative of Abel's character is a direct causality of the idea that indigenous cultures could somehow disappear or be homogenized with "modern American" culture. A complete stranger to his own people, Abel exists only within the context of the novel to remember events that highlight his label as an outsider and his isolation from all that should be inherent and familiar. When he attempts to participate in the ceremonial life of his village, such as when he joins the Bahkyush Eagle Watcher's Society, he only manages to distance himself further from the religious and ceremonial life of the Pueblo tribe. His only response to events is intense violence, as if he is trying to express his own isolation and lack of power by destroying the ways these feelings are capable of affecting him. Perhaps his most notable act of violence is the murder of the albino, perhaps the most visceral symbolic representation of what is responsible for his painful alienation: white colonialism physically manifested, in which he can place his entire incredible fear and anger. The largest and most immediate source of fragmentation in House Made of Dawn is the presence of alcohol and the way it affects Abel's life. The first image we are given of Abel shows him stumbling out of a bus and, 185).