For your consideration:

Late in Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony, Tayo says to Ts’eh: “What is it? Why are you crying?”

She replies: “The end of the story. They want to change it.” She is referring to the witches, or destroyers, and goes on to explain that their representative, Emo, is on his way with doctors and police. They are going to hospitalize or kill Tayo.

She continues: Emo has told them you are crazy, that you live in the cave here and you think you are a Jap soldier. They are all afraid of you.”

Perhaps Tayo truly is insane and deeply paranoid, living unwashed and ungroomed in a dismal cave, imagining his beautiful lover, his various adventures, and his victories over the forces of evil. It is difficult to know for sure which state prevails, for we see the story only from Tayo’s point of view. No one else witnesses the terrible events that he sees; no one else is even aware of the existence of the woman or her brother.

Tayo’s relations with the woman, his raid to recover Josiah’s cattle, and his witnessing of the murder of Harley, could all be parts of his mad vision. His suspicions of Harley and Leroy could be paranoid delusions. Perhaps the madness which grips him, contracted during a war in a foreign land, is intractable and incurable.

This theory is compatible with the idea, which we have discussed in class, that “Wilderness,” and “Nature” are actually human constructs. According to Dr. Shaman, Tayo’s insanity could be an expression of “the idea of idealized social and environmental formulations as expressions of human desire, regardless of apparently “real” relations with a “real” nature.”

In other words, Tayo may have constructed his own version of nature, in his own mind, and of it he is king.

Joe Wichmann