Silko's Ceremony and the Hermeneutic Circle Ceremony is a novel designed to change us. It is a story, which instructs and enlightens, but it is also a tool for relating. It is useful in an extremely practical sense: it teaches us to be connected to our world, to difference and to each other. These are just some of the possible tangible effects the book has on readers, and in reality, the limiting factor in the number of possible uses of Ceremony is simply the number of people who read it. One of the people who read Ceremony and outlined the impact the novel had on her is Alanna Kathleen Brown, a professor in the English department at Montana State University, whose essay is titled "Pulling Silko's Threads Through Time: An Exploration of Storytelling". She's not Native American, but she found all kinds of ways to engage with the text. He brought Native American storytelling, and with it many different tribal attitudes, into his life, and he attributes much of this to Silko's storytelling style. Silko creates a written ceremony with which the reader can interact on an active level. Between Silko's story, storytelling style, and Brown's reading, there is room for another literary theory that can shed light on why so many non-Indians can relate to Native American literature, and this theory it seems tailor-made for Ceremony. It is the idea of ​​the Hermeneutic Circle, an ancient idea in European literary thought, but a useful one that relates literature in many ways similar to those of Silko and his colleagues. Hans-Georg Gadamer, one of the leading exponents of hermeneutic circles, describes the fundamental goal of literature: and of hermeneutics: "something distant must be approached, a certain strangeness... in the middle of the paper... American culture of a time when stories were a community-based enterprise, as they remain largely in Native American communities. By capturing this community spirit, Silko has created a novel that, while thoroughly Native American and tribal in form and content, transcends any cultural, racial, or ethnic barrier and is able to engage with the reader. Works Cited Abrams, MH A Glossary of Literary Terms, 6th ed. Threads Through Time: An Exploration of Storytelling." American Indian Quarterly Spring 1995: 171-179. Colborn, Benjamin. “Becoming at Home Through Reading: Excursing and Returning in the Hermeneutic Circle.” Presented at the 1998 National Undergraduate Literature Conference. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Penguin Books, 1977.