House Made of Dawn focuses on the life of Abel, a young Pueblo mixed-blood who has problems readapting to his culture after he returns from the war, kills a man, is sentenced to prison and is relocated in Los Angeles. Beyond the grimness of what could be a traditional Western novel of alienation, and while retaining until the very end the ambiguity of the modernist genre he chose, Momaday has woven a rich web of traditional Kiowa, Navajo, Pueblo myths, rituals and symbols which he hybridizes even further. Under the prodding of these spiritual mediators and of several ambiguous characters, the protagonist comes to an understanding of his relation to the cosmos. At the end, he is ready to reintegrate his land through the ritual ancestral race of the Pueblo.
