ABSTRACT
As a writer who paints, N. Scott Momaday brings a visual sensibility to his fiction, incorporating complex visual/verbal metaphors involving multi-cultural content and creating a unique color “palette” for his novel House Made of Dawn (1968). These approaches contribute to reader awareness of Native American experiences historically and in the late twentieth century setting of the novel. Momaday presents characters trapped by their human circumstances of individuality and societal pressures. Their biases, hopes, and perspectives are shaped into tropes of “vision” to demonstrate the struggle of his characters to see more, to see “beyond.” Among these tropes are patterns of light and color and their interplay with objects, especially glass. Characters are frequently described in environments of reflected, refracted, or inhibited rays of light, which, in turn, heighten reader’s awareness of characters’ state of mind. The novel presents a variety of literal and metaphoric filters, lenses, and viewpoints that create idioms of sight for understanding character relationships to self and others. The cumulative effect becomes a mediation on the cultural ideas of what it means to become “enlightened.”
