Postwar Reentry Narratives in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

This article examines Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony alongside Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk to reveal the centrality of women’s textual presence in postwar narratives. While Silko’s novel incorporates female perspectives to construct productive and generative narratives, Fountain’s provides a warning about the sterile, ultimately destructive narratives produced when female voices are suppressed. Focusing on the formal elements of narrative focalization in both novels, I argue that women’s voices have the power to rethink the region’s intractable conceptual and geographical boundaries by configuring the American West as a regenerative space of reentry.