Ceremony

“I will tell you something about Stories,

[he said]

They aren’t just entertainment.

Don’t be fooled.

They are all we have, you see,

all we have to fight off

illness and death.”

Ceremony is framed as a story within the story that Thought-Woman dreams up. This section of verse serves as an early marker of The Power of Stories, portraying them as vital to life and as important as good food and water.

“Years and months had become weak, and people could push against them and wander back and forth in time. Maybe it had always been this way and he was only seeing it for the first time.”

Tayo’s internal world is full of jumbled memories that slip and slide into one another. This chaotic recall is a common symptom of PTSD. Tayo’s disjointed sense of time structures Ceremony. The novel lacks typical divisions like chapters; instead, stories and memories flow in and out of one another as they would in Tayo’s head, often in confused ways.

“He lay there with the feeling that there was no place left for him; he would find no peace in that house where the silence and the emptiness echoed the loss.”

Tayo’s grief seems like a permanent fixture in his life in the beginning of the novel. The only home he has ever known is marked by the absence of the people he loved. Tayo’s grief gives positive, material force to things usually conceptualized as a lack (silence, emptiness): They can, paradoxically, echo.