![]() ![]() When the cattle disappear during Tayo's time at war, they come to represent a series of negative forces (the losses incurred by the larger Laguna community, Josiah's failure and demise, and the flight of Tayo's own health and hardiness). As the narrative of Ceremony moves along, the symbolic meanings attached to these animals change. Josiah's cattle are meant to be hardy animals, and initially they symbolize both Josiah's ambitions and the possible triumph of non-Caucasian methods: "These cattle were descendants of generations of desert cattle, born in dry sand and scrubby mesquite, where they hunted water the way desert antelope did" (68). The protagonist's trauma is so thorough that no condition, rainy or arid, seems capable of alleviating it. Oddly enough, though, the dry Laguna landscape is also a source of distress for Tayo-not an antidote to the rain imagery-early in Ceremony. ![]() ![]() Tayo's beloved cousin Rocky is executed as the relentless rain and polluted flood course through the area. Yet the flooding rain that first appears in Ceremony, in Tayo's negative memories of jungle warfare, is given a negative connotation: "He could smell the foaming flood water, stagnant and ripe with the rotting debris it carried past each village, sucking up their sewage, their waste, their dead animals" (11). Normally, a narrative based so strongly on nature imagery might take rain as a symbol of fertility or renewal. ![]()
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