Both are aware of their wandering and are constantly searching for an identity that will allow them to find the world and identity in which they are most suitable for inclusion. Similarly, both Crowe and Tayo experience a traumatic event that leaves them haunted not only by their pasts, but also guilty about their own actions in the past and sure that these actions have caused others pain. Additionally, these hauntings result in both Tayo and Crowe pushing away the ones they love. For Crowe it is his wife and for Tayo, his family. The similarities between the characters of Tayo and Crowe, therefore, suggest the truth of Saez and Winsbro's claims. Ethnic writers Shyamalan and Silko certainly employ a common theme of exclusion and inclusion, a theme that is encompassed by the larger theme of the presence of the past.
The similarities between the works do not end with the simple presence of a common thematic vein, however. In fact, the result of both Crowe and Tayo's hauntings suggests that not only are the plots' themes similar, but they are also used to convey similar meanings. Just as Crowe uses the manifestation of his haunting through his work with Cole and the ghosts they encounter to discover how to overcome his own haunting regarding Grey, so to must Tayo confront his own haunting through a lengthy ceremony before it can be overcome. Most prominently, Tayo faces his own haunting when he is forced to watch Harvey tortured and killed before he can complete his ceremony, suggesting that pain is an important part in assimilating into a new culture. For Crowe, the confrontation comes most blatantly when he is forced to recall the pain of his own death and remember the true evens of the night he was visited by Vincent Grey. Through these confrontations, both Crowe and Tayo find their identities. Crowe is able to leave the world of the living for the world of the dead and Tayo is able to understand that his identity is with his Native American family and village, despite his ancestry, which seemed to align him with the whites that caused the village so much pain.
In using the themes of a search for identity and the presence of the past to suggest that confrontation of one's past is the only method of finding one's true identity and place, both Shyamalan and Silko make important implications for readers, especially ethnic readers or those readers who hope to understand ethnic studies. Shyamalan and Silko establish that while it is common to be haunted by the past and assimilation, or finding one's identity, can be painful, this haunting and wandering is neither advisable nor acceptable. Instead, strong ethnic characters must confront their ghosts and both their pasts and the pasts of their people, a step that will allow them to find peace and inclusion in one world or the other.
Using similar themes and implications, the works of both Shyamalan and Silko employ the supernatural and the mystic to embody the struggles of their main characters. In Esmerelda Santiago's America's Dream, however, ghosts and mysticism are not necessary to make America Gonzalez's life seem frightening. While Ceremony and "The Sixth Sense," introduce the reader to the hauntings of the main character's past through flashbacks and dreams, America's Dream opens to America's mother screaming. Despite a few references to Christian theology, Santiago's novel is devoid of mysticism, of the "dead people" in Shyamalan's film and the Native American spirits of Silko's novel. This does not, however, make America's haunting any less real once she decides to move to New York, escaping abusive boyfriend and father of her child Correa, her drunk mother, and her dead-end career cleaning hotel rooms on a Puerto Rican island. In fact, Ester's shrill scream "bouncing off" the walls, disrupting guests, and causing her to hyperventilate as communicates that America's fourteen-year-old daughter has run away is enough to make the America's haunting much more real than ghosts or spirits for both the main character and the reader (Santiago 2).
Like Crowe and Tayo, America walks a line between two worlds -- Puerto Rico and the United States or her past and her future. Her ties to the island off Puerto Rico include both her family and Correa and the horror she experienced there. Living a new life in the United States as a nanny for a wealthy couple, America is not simply haunted by the faces of those she may have wronged, as...
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