Maura's Blog #1 - pgs 1-29

I don't have a solid opinion on Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko yet, because there isn't really much to grasp in the section that I have read. So far, all I have grasped is that this man has been in the war, has been through much pain both mental and physical, and has lost part of himself on the way. Much of this reading leaves me confused, though I do notice the amazing similes and metaphors.
I appreciate the writing style of Leslie Marmon Silko, but there is a certain point where flashbacks just mix in with reality in this story. For me, in some parts, no matter how many times I read it over and over, I still don't understand. Past? Present? Metaphor? Actuality? Silko could have made this story a little clearer, without losing the style of her writing.
I didn't really note my favorite quotes as I read, but two specific quotes came to mind. (Sorry they're long, the whole paragraph was just a great quote).

"...It flooded out of the last warm core in his chest and echoed inside his head. He damned the rain until the words were a chant, and he sang it while he crawled through the mud to find the corporal and get him up before the Japanese saw them. He wanted the words to make a cloudless blue sky, pale with a summer sun pressing across wide and empty horizons. The words gathered inside him and gave him strength." (Silko 12).

"For a long time he had been white smoke. He did not realize that until he left the hospital, because white smoke had no consciousness of itself. It faded into the white world of their bed sheets and walls; it sucked away by the words of doctors who tried to talk to the invisible scattered smoke. He had seen outlines of gray steel tables, outslines of the food they pushed into his mouth, which was only an outline too, like all the outlines he saw. They saw his outline but they did not realize it was hollow inside. He walked down floors that smelled of old wax and disinfectant, watching the outlines of his feet; as he walked, the days and seasons disappeared into a twilight at the corner of his eyes, a twilight he could catch only with a sudden motion, jerking his head to one side for a glimpse of green leaves pressed against the bars on the window. He inhabited a gray winter fog on a distant elk mountain where hunters are lost indefinately and their own bones mark the boundaries." (Silko 14)

As you can see, I like Silko's metaphors!