House Made of Dawn: Similes 3 key examples

The simile is effective if somewhat ableist in the way it connects a prosthetic body part with inhumanity. Father Olguin has one "good eye" and one prosthetic eye, probably made of glass or porcelain. Momaday notes that the eye is "hard and opaque, like a lump of frozen marrow in the bone." Marrow is a substance inside bones that is essential for producing blood cells. The bone marrow in this simile seems to be malfunctioning somehow; instead of producing warm blood, it sits frozen inside the bone of Father Olguin's skull. And yet this "dull," "frozen" eye is the one that remains "cracked open" at all times, even when the other one is closed. This simile suggests that Father Olguin is looking at the world through an eye that doesn't work, and that doing so is corrupting the very blood that runs through his veins. 

Father Olguin cannot really see the world through his prosthetic eye. However, he does try to see the world and his role in it through the distorted lens of Fray Nicolás's journal. He believes that his job is to follow in the older priest's footsteps and show the people at Walatowa how to live "with an order of industry and repose." In other words, he wants to show them how to put their emotions on ice and adopt a conservative Catholic demeanor. Father Olguin half-blindly apprentices himself to the older priest's wisdom no matter what, even when Fray Nicolás hints at child abuse as one of his teaching methods.

Father Olguin's rigid commitment to Fray Nicolás makes him a bad priest. Like frozen bone marrow that refuses to make fresh blood cells, he refuses to update his ideas or respond to the real human needs of his community until the final chapter. Abel runs to Father Olguin to tell him that Francisco is dead. At first, Father Olguin is offended that Abel would insist on an urgent burial at an inconvenient hour. It is simply not the way things are done. However, all of a sudden, Father Olguin exclaims, "I understand!" While Momaday does not explicitly name what the priest understands, he seems to be having an epiphany about the real human pain Abel is bringing to him. No matter how things have always been done and no matter what Fray Nicolás might say, Father Olguin realizes that Abel's grief deserves an urgent response. At long last, he opens his other eye and looks at his community through a soft human gaze that is neither opaque nor frozen.

The dead man's arm looks to Abel like the bright white belly of a fish decorated with bloody nails that look like a string of black beads. The beads seem to gesture toward rosary beads. These strings of beads are used in Catholic worship to count a special sequence of prayers. Many devout Catholics carry these beads around with them so that they are ready to pray wherever they are. To Abel, who has grown up in the presence of Catholic missionaries, Catholicism and Whiteness are extremely fraught spaces. He faces extraordinary pressure to conform to their ideals, and yet he will always be an outsider in both spaces because of his racial and cultural background.

Fragua's albinism is simply a genetic trait that is unrelated to race, but to Abel, this man is the epitome of Whiteness to which Abel will never have access. He sees Fragua as a White man with rosary beads, which is exactly who Abel will never be. Abel does not want to be Fragua. Still, he seems to feel extreme resentment over Juan Reyes Fragua's conformity and the power his whiteness brings him. Earlier in the book, when Fragua ritually beat Abel with a rooster, Abel took it as confirmation that Fragua was the enemy at the root of all his suffering. In this scene, Abel triumphs by killing Fragua. He stares down at the white arm, believing that he has bested not only the man who once beat him, but also Whiteness and Catholicism.

However, the fish simile foreshadows the ongoing nature of Abel's struggles. In the second part of the novel, Momaday describes a kind of fish that spawns at high tide in Los Angeles and gets stuck on the beach. The helpless, belly-up fish comes to symbolize Abel. In Los Angeles, where supposedly everyone goes to fit in, Abel finds that he is still treated like an American Indian who is inferior to White people. His recent release from prison further marks him as an outsider and gets him into trouble with abusive police officers. The colonial forces Abel tried to defeat by killing Fragua still rage on. In the end, Fragua's arm represents a fish that dies on the beach, a victim to the colonial trauma that tears his and Abel's community apart. What Abel must learn to do is keep living in the face of trauma, hoping that he will be one of the fish that survives.

This is the same trap Francisco investigated the night he picked Abel up at the bus stop. It is designed to catch a bird in a noose, and Francisco reset it that night after it caught a disappointing bird. When he checks it again tonight, he finds that the rising water level has sprung it, closing the noose without any prey inside. And yet the simile comparing the noose to a "spider's thread" suggests that even though the trap has been neutralized, it still represents danger.

The way Francisco utters Abel's nickname at the start of this passage suggests that somehow, he already knows that his grandson is the one caught in the "noose." The rising water represents the rising tension Abel feels throughout the first part of the novel. He has just returned home from a traumatic battlefield experience, an experience he only went through because the United States drafted him into the armed services. This is the same government whose policies have been harming his family his entire life and for generations before. He feels utterly exploited and abandoned, and he struggles to find his way to any kind of normalcy. When Juan Reyes Fragua, a man with the whitest skin imaginable, beats him with a rooster at the Feast of Santiago, Abel practically boils over with obsessive rage. His rage drives him to murder just like the rising water triggering the bird trap.

Momentarily, Abel may feel triumphant and relieved that he has killed the man who has humiliated him. He is finally demonstrating that he will not be kept down by military tanks or the exploitation and abuse of White men (whether they are truly White or merely look it). Francisco is better positioned to understand that the murder makes everything worse: Abel will go to prison for what he has done. If he is ever to come home, he will have to claw his way back from even further trauma within a colonial system that is stacked against him. Revenge against Fragua, symbol of Whiteness that he is, was the tempting bait that led Abel straight into this trap and left him dangling.