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  • Abel’s Military Service and Belonging in N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn
  • Nathan Pfaff (bio)

Abel, the Army veteran and Pueblo protagonist of N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, is undoubtably haunted by his battlefield experiences during World War II, and when critics consider Abel’s military service, they focus almost exclusively on its negative effects. Because the only sections of text focusing on Abel’s military service describe the same traumatic battlefield event, this perspective is somewhat understandable, but this perspective—one that presumes Abel’s military experience was only traumatic and therefore only negative, alienating, and destructive1—ignores textual indications that Abel’s service experience was more nuanced.

First among these indications is a subtly revealed fact that suggests he harbored feelings about the Army beyond critics’ typical assumptions related to trauma and alienation. Five days after Abel’s return from World War II, Momaday describes the scene at the feast of Santiago and says of Abel: “For the first time since coming home he had done away with his uniform” (House 37). Abel sobered up from his drunken arrival, walked the land, chopped Angela’s wood, and only on his fifth morning home did he retire the visible symbol of his membership in the Army. Why did he wait so long? Some might suggest Abel’s drinking and battlefield traumas left him so apathetic that he was incapable of self-care, but his attempt to reconnect with the land by walking it and feeling that “for a moment everything was all right within him” contradict this assertion (27). Abel is by no means free of psychological issues (the moment does not last), but he is functioning, and I suggest that his choice to continue wearing the uniform—to publicly display his affiliation with the Army—indicates he harbors positive associations with his military service in addition to the obvious traumatic ones. [End Page 30]

This is not the only textual indication that Abel’s World War II experience was more nuanced than critics assume, and one of this article’s aims is to investigate these indications with more rigor, but admittedly they are few and they leave most of Abel’s military experiences undetermined. Paradoxically, this dearth of textual evidence makes Abel’s military service and especially its critical interpretation ripe for examination. Because Momaday leaves Abel’s Army experience a half empty vessel, critics have filled it with their own assumptions about military service—assumptions that, I will argue, result in an overdetermined reading of the novel.

This essay aims to explore an interpretive gap left by critics who have focused on trauma and excluded other facets of military service. Some of this work can be accomplished by reading House Made of Dawn’s few military incidents with an intimate understanding of the Army, but even with these new readings, the vessel that is Abel’s military service remains partially empty. To fill it, this essay takes a consciously different approach from those of previous critics by assuming Abel’s military experience was analogous to that of real Native American World War II veterans. This essay uses the experiences of these actual veterans, especially Pueblo and Navajo veterans, to fill in the background behind the textual examples the novel does provide.

The validity of this approach—combing rigorous analysis of the novel’s military incidents with historical perspective based on Native World War II veterans’ experiences—is bolstered by the fact, explained by Momaday himself, that the genesis of the novel comes from his interactions with Native veterans at Jemez from 1946–1951 (Momaday, Conversations 211). Additionally, Momaday said in a 1985 interview that Abel “represents a great many people of his generation, the Indian who returns from the war, the Second World War. He is an important figure in the whole history of the American experience in this country” (162). Here Momaday makes an explicit representative connection between Abel and Native World War II veterans, and this connection combines with the ambiguous “He” (which could reference Abel or “the Indian who returns from the war” or both simultaneously) to suggest Momaday intended for the experiences of Native World War...

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