Tayo ends up at a woman's house. He tells her he is looking
for his uncle's cattle. She allows him to water his horse and invites
him in for supper. She tells him he can see the stars that night.
Tayo had waited all summer until September when he saw the stars
Betonie had told him about. He had followed them to this place,
and when he stepped out on the porch he saw them.
Analysis
Although most of the novel is focused on the particular
experiences of Native American men after World War II, a few vignettes,
the one in a previous section of a mother and son in Gallup, and
this one of Helen Jean also consider the specifics of women's situations.
While the men have to deal with the aftermath of their experience
as soldiers, and often with alcoholism, the women confront abject
poverty where often their only resource is their own bodies. While
the men who leave the reservation may find work, albeit greatly
underpaid, doing menial or hard labor, the women are not even offered that
much. Most often, although they leave the reservation with the best
intentions of finding a decent job and sending money back home to
help, they find that the only work they can obtain is prostitution.
The stories of the women are not developed in any length, but their
presence in the novel shows a concern for the range of experiences
of men and women, and for the ways in which femininity as well as
masculinity are affected by the contact between Native American
and white cultures.
Although Tayo has embarked on a ceremony, his transformation is
slow and incomplete and does not separate him completely from his
past life. Tayo's joining up again with Harley and Leroy is representative
of the situations throughout the novel where it is often difficult
to separate the good from the bad. In fact, most situations have
both positive and negative aspects that cannot be separated from
one another. In this case, the friendship Harley and Leroy offer Tayo
is a wonderful thing, contributing to his sense of belonging in his
community and to his understanding that his reaction to the war is
a common one. However, Harley and Leroy are not able to move beyond
their drinking to find a true cure for themselves, and they draw
Tayo back into their escape mechanism. And then, as they show Tayo
the end result of their resorting to alcohol—a total lack of self
control—Harley and Leroy point him back onto the right path.
The story of the gambler demonstrates that no single party
is to blame in the creation of a bad situation. The gambler is only
able to play with those who are willing to gamble. People are shown
to be willing to gamble when they feel that they have nothing left
to lose. Although he kills them, in that very act the gambler shows
them that they still possessed something of value. While he is powerful,
the gambler is not invincible, and with the right tools he too can
be tricked.
The woman at whose house Tayo spends the night is the
last of the key women figures in the novel. In this scene and in
the next in which she appears, she is not given a name. In this
way, she acquires a more universal, symbolic value. She is not just
one particular woman, but, as she is simply called "the woman,"
she is representative of all women and embodies all womanhood. Tayo
notes her resemblance to an antelope, which again reinforces her
symbolic value: she is also the spirit of female animals. Although
she feeds and houses Tayo, the woman is in no way subservient to
him.
