Reflection

This past week we finished reading and annotating the novel "Ceremony". We continued to focus on analyzing this book, and once again there was a very strong focus on the idea of healing in this section of the book. In this part of the book, Tayo is thinking about the ceremony that he just completed, and it said he was "testing" the feeling against the feeling he had before the ceremony. This "testing" was Tayo's way of checking whether or not the ceremony had actually affected him and successfully worked on him, and got rid of the pain in his life. Also, Tayo was worried about whether or not these affects would be permanent or if they would wear away over time. In the end of this section Tayo realizes that this ceremony could be too good to be true. He goes out with his friends and gets really drunk, which shows that his pain is not gone because he had to use alcohol to cover up this pain. Obviously, the end of this book was strongly focused on the idea of healing, and it just shows how important this idea is to Tayo, and to the native culture as a whole.

Symbolism

During this past week we have gotten very deep into the text of the novel "Ceremony", and have been focusing on deciphering the ending of this book. I have noticed that there is a very high amount of symbolism found throughout this section of the book, all of which are very important. Many of these symbols are things that have already played a huge role in this story, but I never realized what some of these things actually stood for.
One symbol that is very important throughout the whole book is the symbol of Ts'eh, but it is not until near the end of the book when she predicts what will happen to Tayo and how he can avoid being captured that it is confirmed that she is in fact a mythical creature, and in a way a symbol for the earth. Another important symbol found in this section is what the uranium mine symbolizes. Betonie told tayo that in order to cure the new illness, there had to be new ceremonies that made use of objects from the whites. Uranium is this object from the whites, and it symbolizes the relationship that the white people had with the earth , and how they felt like they could just take whatever they wanted from it. One more important symbol found in the end of this book is the symbolism that comes along with rain. Even though the rain never actually returned, it is obvious that it is going to, and this is a symbol for Tayo's troubles and problems returning even after he completed the ceremony. These are just a few of the symbols that I felt were the most important in making this story the way it was, and the ones that I felt completed this story and tied everything together.

Healing

This past week we have been focusing on analyzing the book "Ceremony" in an extremely in-depth way. The biggest topic that I felt was most important from the section that we were focusing on was the topic of healing. Specifically, the spiritual healing of Tayo. In this section of the book, Tayo is part of a ceremony that was performed as an attempt to cure him of some of the troubles in his life. After this ceremony, Tayo felt as if he had been cured, but quickly realized he might not have been correct.
Immediately after the ceremony, Tayo felt like he had been completely cured and that the ceremony worked perfectly. Even though he felt great after the ceremony, it wasn't long until he was back to drowning out the troubles in his life with things such as alcohol, instead of just dealing with them another way. Very soon after the ceremony, Tayo was pressured into going out and getting drunk with some of his friends. A big part of Tayo's problems with dealing with things in his life came from his abuse of alcohol, and more specifically how his friends are constantly pressuring him to drink, and quite frankly just don't care about Tayo and his well being. Overall, this section of the book strongly revolved around the idea of Tayo being healed, but in reality I think that Tayo is still very far from being healed.