House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday

Published 1969 · 198 pages · 67,783 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction

How hard is House Made of Dawn to read?

House Made of Dawn scores 61 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
Native American and ceremonial vocabulary.
Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
Momaday's lyrical, complex sentences.
Abstraction: 65 out of 100
Identity, land, and ceremony.
Information density: 60 out of 100
Dense with Pueblo and ceremonial detail.
Narrative indirection: 65 out of 100
Fragmented, ceremonial structure.
Symbolic density: 70 out of 100
Dawn, landscape carry enormous weight.
Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
Momaday writes with engaged intensity.
Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
Running at dawn; healing suggested.
Structural complexity: 65 out of 100
Four-part ceremonial structure.

How House Made of Dawn is regarded

House Made of Dawn holds a literary regard score of 88 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where House Made of Dawn sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (123 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, House Made of Dawn scores 78 out of 100. A second mythos, romance, pulls at it with a weight of 0.3. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic (low mimetic realism returning toward myth)
Against the winter sky and the long, light landscape of the valley at dawn, he seemed almost to be standing still, very little and alone.
Symbol: Mythical (archetypal), with Anagogic close
House made of pollen, house made of dawn.
Mythos: Irony iv (Tragic Pathos), turning to Romance iii (irony iv)
Word by word by word these men were disposing of him in language, their language, and they were making a bad job of it.
Genre: Romance + Novel + Anatomy
I have taken as my text this evening the almighty Word itself.

Where the story of House Made of Dawn takes place

  • New Mexico and Los Angeles, 1945-1952 (1945 to 1952), the main setting
  • Fray Nicolas's journal at the Walatowa mission, 1874-1888 (1874 to 1888)
  • Francisco's youth: the long race, the bear hunt, Porcingula, 1880s-90s (1885 to 1895)
  • Kiowa Plains and Rainy Mountain, Oklahoma (Aho's sun dance memories) (1887 to 1890)
  • Navajo country around Wide Ruins and Cornfields (Ben's boyhood) (1930 to 1945)
  • Walatowa (Jemez Pueblo), New Mexico, July-August 1945
  • Los Angeles, 1952 (Tosamah's mission, Abel and Ben's room) (1951 to 1952)
  • Walatowa, February 1952 (Francisco's death, the dawn run)

5 things that are true of House Made of Dawn, with the passage for each

  1. The novel opens with the line 'Dypaloh' and the image of a house made of dawn, before any chapter heading.

    Dypaloh. There was a house made of dawn. It was made of pollen and of rain, and the land was very old and everlasting.

  2. Francisco keeps a pencil drawing of a running man in his ledger book, dated 1889.

    It was the likeness of a straight black man running in the snow. Beneath it was the legend “1889.”

  3. The Los Angeles mission's signboard ends with the line 'Be kind to a white man today'.

    Be kind to a white man today

  4. The peyote meeting Tosamah leads uses forty-four peyote buttons.

    A paper bag containing forty-four peyote buttons.

  5. After the quarrel, Abel stays away from Ben for three days before being found at the foot of the stairs.

    He didn’t come back for three days.

Scenes in House Made of Dawn that Frye would name

54 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Agon, untitled
He leaned inside the white man’s arms and drove the blade up under the bones of the breast and across. Abel kills the albino with a knife: the formal combat.
Agon, untitled
Again and again the white man struck him, heavily, brutally, upon the chest and shoulders and head, and Abel threw up his hands, but the great bird fell upon them and beat them down. The albino's rooster-flailing is the opening contest of the quest.
Sparagmos, untitled
Then the bird was dead, and still he swung it down and across, and the neck of the bird was broken and the flesh torn open and the blood splashed everywhere about. The rooster is torn apart in a displaced sacrificial rite.
Pathos, untitled
He approached and knelt down in the rain to watch death come upon the white man’s face. The albino's death in the rain is the sacrificial pathos of the first section.
Epos, untitled
I have taken as my text this evening the almighty Word itself. Tosamah's sermon is spoken oration with an audience.
Sparagmos, untitled
he could see his hands; they were twisted and mangled, the thumbs splayed back and broken at the joints. Abel's mutilated hands after Martinez's beating.

Books that share these scenes with House Made of Dawn

About the author

N. Scott Momaday