Character analysis
Harley
in Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
Harley is a Laguna Pueblo veteran and one of Tayo's closest friends from wartime. In Ceremony, he acts as both a reflection of Tayo's trauma and a warning about the effects of assimilation and spiritual disconnection on a Native man. Like Tayo, Harley fought in World War II and returned deeply affected, but while Tayo gradually finds healing through ceremony and a reconnection with the land, Harley sinks further into alcoholism and despair. In the early chapters, he is portrayed as a cheerful, hard-drinking companion who enjoys riding horses and sharing beers with Tayo, his laughter hiding significant emotional wounds. However, as the story unfolds, his apparent friendship starts to unravel: Harley becomes a tool—whether he realizes it or not—of the dark forces that aim to destroy Tayo. In the novel's climactic scene, Harley and Leroy deceive Tayo into going to the uranium mine at Jackpile, where Emo plans to kill him, showing how completely these dark forces have taken over men who once belonged to Tayo's world. Harley's story takes a tragic turn: he is killed by Emo, a victim of the same destructive powers that engulfed him. His defining characteristics include a warm exterior that masks a profound emptiness, a vulnerability to manipulation, and a failure to break free from self-destructive patterns that the dark forces exacerbate. He serves as a contrasting figure to Tayo, highlighting the consequences of a healing ceremony that goes unfulfilled.
Who they are
Harley is a Laguna Pueblo veteran introduced early in Ceremony as one of Tayo's closest wartime friends. On the surface, he is gregarious and good-humoured, the kind of man whose laughter fills a bar and whose company softens the loneliness of the reservation. Silko presents him initially through the pleasure he takes in small freedoms—riding horses with Tayo, sharing cold beer, trading jokes—pleasures that feel like survivorship but function, the novel gradually reveals, as a kind of slow anaesthetic. Beneath the warmth is a man hollowed out by the same war that shattered Tayo and by the same historical forces that have worked for generations to sever Laguna people from ceremony, land, and identity. Harley is not a villain; he is a casualty, and that distinction is essential to understanding how Silko uses him.
Arc & motivation
Harley's arc moves in the opposite direction from Tayo's. Where Tayo's story is structured as a gradual return—to the land, to the old stories, to ceremonial time—Harley's is a steady drift away from all three. His motivation, insofar as it can be named, is relief: relief from the war's images, from the dissonance of being a Native man treated as a hero by an America that otherwise diminishes him, from the grief that has no sanctioned outlet. Alcohol provides that relief most reliably, and Silko shows how the witchery's logic operates through such reliabilities. By the time Harley helps lure Tayo to the uranium mine at Jackpile, he has been so thoroughly absorbed into the destructive pattern that it is nearly impossible to say how conscious his betrayal is. His arc ends not with redemption but with elimination: Emo kills him once he is no longer useful, confirming that the forces which consumed him never valued him at all.
Key moments
The horseback-riding scenes in the novel's early sections establish Harley's warmth and his bond with Tayo while subtly showing how evasion—physical motion, laughter, drink—substitutes for healing. His participation in the bar culture the veterans share with Emo and Leroy is a sustained key moment: it is in these spaces that the witchery's hold tightens, and Harley's presence normalizes a world in which the veterans' stories grow increasingly dangerous rather than communal. The climactic moment at Jackpile is Harley's most consequential appearance: he and Leroy bring Tayo to the mine, and it is only Tayo's restraint—his refusal to intervene violently when he sees Emo torturing Leroy—that breaks the ceremony of destruction and saves him. Harley never appears again after that night, and his off-page death, reported rather than dramatised, underscores how completely he has been discarded.
Relationships in depth
Tayo is the relationship that defines Harley structurally. They share trauma, ethnicity, friendship, and the disorientation of return, yet their trajectories diverge absolutely. Harley is Tayo's dark double—the version of Tayo that never encountered Betonie, never climbed the mountain toward Ts'eh, never completed the ceremony. Every scene in which they drink together is implicitly a scene about a fork in the road.
Emo is Harley's destroyer, though the destruction is prepared long before the mine. Emo is deliberate and sadistic where Harley is passive and wounded, and Silko makes clear that manipulation of the latter by the former follows a certain logic: witchery uses what is already broken. Once Harley has served his function, Emo kills him without hesitation, and there is no suggestion of remorse.
Rocky offers a structural parallel worth examining. Rocky died in the Philippines, a casualty of the war itself; Harley survived the war only to be killed by the war's aftermath on the reservation. Silko distributes the costs of assimilation and disconnection across both characters, suggesting that the violence is systemic rather than personal.
Betonie's absence in Harley's life is itself a kind of relationship. Betonie's ceremony is explicitly framed as protection against the witchery, and Harley's fate functions as the novel's proof-of-concept for what that ceremony guards against.
Connected characters
- Tayo
Harley is Tayo's fellow veteran and drinking companion. Their early bond reflects shared trauma, but Harley ultimately becomes an unwitting agent of the witchery that nearly destroys Tayo, luring him to the mine site in the novel's climax. He is Tayo's dark double—the path Tayo might have taken without ceremony.
- Emo
Emo manipulates and ultimately murders Harley, exploiting Harley's weakness and alcoholism to use him as a tool against Tayo. Their relationship illustrates how the witchery consumes its own instruments once they are no longer useful.
- Betonie
Harley never undergoes the healing ceremony Betonie performs for Tayo, and his fate implicitly underscores the necessity of that ceremony. His destruction stands as proof of what Betonie warns against: the witchery's power over those who remain unprotected.
- Rocky
Both Rocky and Harley represent paths of assimilation and disconnection from Laguna tradition. Rocky died in the war; Harley survives it only to be destroyed at home, suggesting that the violence of witchery claims veterans in different ways.
- Night Swan
Harley has no direct relationship with Night Swan, but both inhabit the margins of Laguna society. Night Swan's transformative power contrasts with Harley's stagnation, highlighting the novel's theme that some characters catalyze healing while others accelerate destruction.
Use this in your essay
The double motif: Analyse Harley as Tayo's shadow self, arguing that Silko structures his arc to make visible what ceremony saves Tayo *from* rather than simply what it gives him.
Complicity and victimhood: To what extent is Harley a willing agent of the witchery, and to what extent its victim? Consider how Silko's refusal to assign him clean moral status complicates the novel's ethics.
Alcoholism as witchery: Using Harley, Leroy, and Emo's bar culture as evidence, argue that Silko frames alcohol not merely as a social problem but as a structural mechanism of colonial destruction.
The expendable veteran: Examine how Harley's death—unwitnessed, reported after the fact—comments on how America discards the Native soldiers it once claimed as heroes.
Incompleteness as fate: Build a thesis around the idea that characters in *Ceremony* who remain outside ceremonial time are not simply unhealthy but literally vulnerable to destruction, using Harley's arc as your central case.