How we cite our quotes: (Poem.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Rocky made him look at the corpse and said, "Tayo, this is a Jap! This is a Jap uniform!" And then he rolled the body over with his boot and said, "Look Tayo, look at the face," and that was when Tayo started screaming because it wasn't a Jap, it was Josiah, eyes shrinking back into the skull and all their shining black light glazed over by death. (IV.3)
Is it possible that Tayo went crazy during the war? When we first hear about his visions in the jungle, we think he must have. But what about after the war?
Quote #2
They called it battle fatigue, and they said hallucinations were common with malarial fever. (IV.4)
The white doctors have a scientific-sounding explanation for Tayo's condition—he has "battle fatigue" and malaria. Well, that explains everything, right? But Silko won't accept this explanation of what's going on inside Tayo's head.
Quote #3
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. (V.33)
This is how Tayo describes his mental confusion, as the feeling that he has lost all track of time. Does that make him crazy, or is he finally seeing things the way they really are?
Quote #4
He had believed in the stories for a long time, until the teachers at Indian school taught him not to believe in that kind of "nonsense." But they had been wrong. (V.36)
The white teachers at Indian school try to promote a scientific understanding of the world, but Tayo rejects their world view.
Quote #5
Rocky tried to tell them that keeping the carcass on the floor in a warm room was bad for the meat. He wanted to hang the deer in the woodshed, where the meat would stay cold and cure properly. (VII.10)
Rocky's attitude toward the Ritual of the Deer shows that he has accepted the scientific perspective he's learned at school and rejected the mythological and ritualistic perspective of the Laguna community.
Quote #6
The problem was the books were written by white people who did not think about drought or winter blizzards or dry thistles, which the cattle had to live with. [ . . . ] "I guess we'll have to get along without these books," he said. "We'll have to do things our own way." (X.24-25)
Strike one against science. Josiah notices all sort of problems with the scientific books he reads about cattle-raising. Cattle raised according to their methods would never survive in the New Mexican desert.
Quote #7
He never lost the feeling he had in his chest when she spoke those words, as she did each time she told them stories; and he still felt it was true, despite all they had taught him in school—that long long ago things had been different, and human beings could understand what the animals said, and once the Gambler had trapped the storm clouds on his mountaintop. (XI.41)
Is the magic Tayo experiences limited to the stories from long ago, or is there evidence that magical things still happen in the world? What do you make of the episode with Tayo and the mountain lion?
Quote #8
"And Emo has been saying things about you. He's been talking about how you went crazy and are alone out here. He talks bulls*** about caves and animals." (XXV.121)
Here we come back to the question of Tayo's sanity. How must he come across to an outsider? No one has seen Ts'eh but Tayo. Could she be a figment of his imagination? Maybe he is living all alone out here.
Quote #9
It was difficult then to call up the feeling the stories had, the feeling of Ts'eh and old Betonie. It was easier to feel and to believe the rumors. Crazy. Crazy Indian. Seeing things. Imagining things. (XXV.211)
Ts'eh, Betonie, and the "stories" are all part of a category we'll call "traditional perspective." The army doctors and Emo's rumors represent a "modern perspective." One group sees Tayo as crazy, while the other does not.
Quote #10
He cried the relief he felt at finally seeing the pattern, the way all the stories fit together—the old stories, the war stories, their stories—to become the story that was still being told. He was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time. (XXV.223)
What earlier felt like craziness—imagining people could wander back and forth in time—now seems to make perfect sense thanks to Tayo's new understanding of the ceremony.
Quote #11
He would have been another victim, a drunk Indian war veteran settling an old feud; and the army doctors would say that the indications of this end had been there all along [ . . . ]. The white people would shake their heads, more proud than sad that it took a white man to survive in their world [ . . . ]. (XXVI.27)
Tayo imagines how killing Emo would look from the point of view of the white people. They would have been wrong, but their rumors would have reinforced their unhealthy way of looking at the world.