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Explanation and Analysis:
House Made of Dawn is a novel that helped start the literary movement now known as the Native American Renaissance. Momaday earned a PhD in English from Stanford, and the novel reflects his deep knowledge of European and European American literary traditions. It focuses on a character's social development into adulthood and therefore might be classified as a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel. It draws on modernist and postmodernist techniques such as stream of consciousness, a nonlinear narrative, and "polyvocal" storytelling (storytelling through multiple narrators who each have their own perspective). It contains references to Christianity, such as Abel's name. It also engages with the trauma caused by World War II, which was a major subject of mainstream literature in the mid-20th century.
Even as Momaday draws on these mainstream tools of the trade, he merges them with traditional American Indian storytelling techniques to create a genre all its own. For example, the novel begins with the word "Dypaloh" and ends with the word, "Qtsedaba," traditional Jemez or Towa words that signify the start and end of a story. These words can be loosely translated as "once upon a time" and "the end," but they also convey a greater sense of ritual and responsibility than readers might associate with these fairy-tale phrases in English. Among the Jemez Pueblo and other American Indian peoples, storytellers are public servants tasked with the sacred work of keeping culture alive and bringing their communities together. Momaday bookends the novel with "Dypaloh" and "Qtsedaba" to establish that the novel is not only about American Indian characters, but also a celebration and invocation of their culture and existence.
At the time Momaday was writing, many people believed that the idea of a Native American novel was almost an oxymoron. Traditionally, oral storytelling holds a far bigger place in American Indian cultures than writing. American Indian voices were largely excluded from mainstream literature for a long time due to the widespread, racist belief that American Indians could not write, and that if they did, it was evidence that they had assimilated to White settler culture. Momaday's novel boldly challenges this idea. As a literary work, it is evidence that American Indian ideas, language, culture, and people can and do exist in the same modern world as the Pulitzer Prize or Stanford University. It paved the way for an entire genre of Native American novels to be published and recognized as important literary works and also artifacts of their authors' culture.
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