| Summary: | 碩士 === 淡江大學 === 英文學系碩士班 === 95 === This thesis sets out as a continuance of the preceding studies on Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony which centers on the issue of sense of place, and the interrelationship between man and the landscape. The study combines with Gilles Deleuze’s concepts such as multiplicity, rhizome, and becoming to show the dynamism or circulating energies within the big whole.
The first chapter locates Tayo’s identity in the culture he is striving to fit in. In his journey of searching for the lost cattle of mixed breed, he also finds himself as part of a bigger family. While traveling through the places, Tayo’s sense of place widens and shifts in that he combines the places with the traditional stories, stories of his own, and the places. Tayo rediscovers his identity by connecting himself with the matrix of the Laguna Pueblo culture and the land.
Chapter Two explains how Tayo is merged with the places by embarking on a series of spiritual metamorphoses. By inserting traditional stories into the contemporary events, Tayo empathizes with the humming bird and fly in the stories. In a sense, Tayo transfers himself into other forms of being so as to get closer to the place via multiple entryways.
Chapter Three further elucidates Tayo’s construction of a sense of place. He assimilates the external landscape and digests them to organize an ever expanding internal landscape. Tayo’s sense of place is a multiple hybriditity that involves not just the sand, stone, animals, insects but the stories about them. The stories are overlapping just as a sense of place for most people is overlapping. We share a sense of place by sharing stories. The stories are multiplying in the collective memories of the people; when they are telling a story, they conjure up the people of the past and again they are alive when their stories are being told.
We can see Tayo’s sense of place as a layered map which helps him in reweaving connections with the places and their stories that have been there for ages. Therefore, we may conclude that the expansion of a sense of place in this novel is not a creation, but a continuation and transition of the tradition.
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