Character analysis
Ben Benally
in House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
Ben Benally is a Navajo man living in Los Angeles and serves as Abel's closest friend, roommate, and narrator of the novel's third section. As a relocated Native American working in a factory, Ben finds himself in a liminal space between reservation life and urban assimilation. He has adapted outwardly to city life—holding down a job and navigating the streets of LA—yet he remains spiritually connected to the Navajo Night Chant and the landscape of his childhood. This tension shapes his character: Ben is warm, generous, and quietly nostalgic, but his adjustment to white society comes with a cost that he only partially recognizes.
Ben's journey is one of loyal witness rather than transformation. He takes Abel in, introduces him to Milly, and watches helplessly as Abel spirals downward after the beating by Martinez. On the night Abel lies broken on the beach, Ben sings fragments of the Night Chant over him—a moment that highlights Ben's role as a keeper of ceremonial memory, even in exile. His narration, delivered in a colloquial, circular manner, reveals both tenderness and self-deception: he romanticizes the reservation life he has largely left behind while avoiding the reality of his own displacement.
Ben's defining traits are empathy, cultural in-betweenness, and a gentle fatalism. He cannot save Abel, but his singing serves as a form of spiritual witness that connects the urban wasteland to the healing ceremonies Abel will eventually find back home. In the end, Ben represents the cost and compromise of life for Native Americans during the relocation era.
Who they are
Ben Benally is a Navajo man in his twenties living in Los Angeles during the federal relocation era—the government's mid-century policy of moving Native Americans off reservations and into urban centers as a form of forced assimilation. He works a factory job, shares a small apartment, and by most surface measures has "made it" in the city. Yet Momaday renders Ben as fundamentally doubled: he is simultaneously an assimilated worker and a keeper of sacred song, a man who has learned to wear the city's rhythms without ever fully surrendering to them. His narration in Part Three ("The Night Chanter") is delivered in a colloquial, looping, almost improvisational voice—a style that mirrors his consciousness, circling back to the reservation landscape of his childhood even while his feet remain planted on Los Angeles asphalt. This voice is warm and unpretentious, but Momaday embeds within it a persistent melancholy that Ben himself cannot quite name.
Arc & motivation
Ben's arc is not a transformation but a deepening of witness. He does not change his circumstances, leave the city, or experience a spiritual awakening in any dramatic sense. What he does is hold on—to Abel, to fragments of the Night Chant, to a vision of canyon country that sustains him even as it recedes. His motivation is empathy rooted in shared displacement: he recognizes in Abel a man more openly broken by relocation and trauma, and responds with the instinct to shelter. He introduces Abel to work, to Milly, to Tosamah's pan-Indian community—small architectures of survival. Yet Ben's adaptation carries a cost he only partially acknowledges. His nostalgia for the reservation is genuine, but it also functions as self-protection, allowing him to idealize a home he has effectively left rather than confront what leaving has taken from him.
Key moments
The most concentrated and revealing scene in Ben's section is the night on the beach after Martinez beats Abel nearly to death. Ben sits beside Abel's broken body and sings fragments of the Night Chant—Tsoa teh, house made of dawn—not as a curative ceremony performed correctly but as an act of desperate love and memorial witness. The ceremony is partial, incomplete, conducted on a California beach rather than the red earth of Diné Bikéyah, and yet Momaday presents it as the most spiritually authentic gesture in Ben's life. It distills his entire character: a ceremonial memory that has survived dislocation, deployed imperfectly but sincerely in the face of violence. Earlier, Ben's narration dwells on childhood memories of running with his grandfather and the sound of the Night Chant being sung properly, intact, on the land it belongs to—a contrast that makes the beach scene ache. His passivity before Martinez also matters: Ben watches and fears and ultimately cannot intervene, exposing the structural powerlessness of relocated Native men before institutional white authority.
Relationships in depth
Ben's relationship with Abel is the novel's most sustained portrait of Native male solidarity. It is intimate without being idealized—Ben sees Abel's self-destruction clearly while refusing to abandon him, and his narration carries both grief and guilt. With Milly, Ben reveals his yearning for ordinary belonging; he is fond of her in a way that suggests he wishes such connection were more available to him. His attitude toward Tosamah is the most politically charged of his relationships: Ben attends the peyote meetings and acknowledges Tosamah's rhetorical brilliance, but quietly registers that Tosamah's mockery of Abel is a cruelty dressed as cultural authority. This contrast—Tosamah's loud, performative pan-Indianism versus Ben's private, inherited ceremonialism—frames one of the novel's central arguments about what Indigenous survival actually requires. Ben's awareness of Angela St. John is wary and peripheral; he understands, without needing to articulate it, how white desire for Native men operates as appropriation rather than recognition. And Francisco, known only through Abel's stories and Ben's imagination, functions as a horizon of longing—the ceremonial grandfather-world Ben has not entirely lost but cannot reach.
Connected characters
- Abel
Ben's central relationship. He rooms with Abel in LA, acts as guide and protector, and narrates Abel's urban disintegration with grief-stricken intimacy. When Martinez beats Abel nearly to death, Ben sits with him on the beach and sings the Night Chant—an act of love and ceremonial solidarity that defines both characters.
- Milly
Ben introduces Milly to Abel and is himself fond of her. She represents the possibility of assimilation and human connection in the city; Ben's relationship with her underscores his own desire for belonging even as he recognizes its fragility.
- John Big Bluff Tosamah
Ben and Abel attend Tosamah's peyote meetings. Ben respects Tosamah's oratorical power but is quietly critical of his cruelty toward Abel. The contrast between Tosamah's performative pan-Indianism and Ben's private ceremonial memory highlights competing modes of Native survival in the city.
- Martinez
Martinez is the corrupt cop who brutalizes Abel. Ben witnesses the aftermath and is paralyzed by fear and powerlessness—his inability to confront Martinez exposes the vulnerability of relocated Native men before institutional violence.
- Francisco
Francisco exists in Ben's consciousness largely through Abel's stories and Ben's own nostalgic imaginings of reservation life. Francisco embodies the ceremonial world Ben has partially abandoned, making him a figure of longing in Ben's narration.
- Angela St. John
Ben is aware of Angela's earlier relationship with Abel and her later visit to Abel in the hospital. She represents the white world's fleeting, appropriative engagement with Native men—a dynamic Ben observes with wary, unspoken understanding.
Use this in your essay
The incomplete ceremony as metaphor: Analyze how Ben's fragmented performance of the Night Chant on the Los Angeles beach comments on what relocation does to inherited cultural practice—and whether Momaday frames incompleteness as failure or as resilience.
Narrative voice as character: Ben's circular, colloquial narration stands in formal contrast to the novel's other sections. Argue how Momaday's choice of style for Ben's chapters reflects his psychological condition—specifically his self-deception about assimilation.
Witness vs. agency: Ben cannot stop Martinez, cannot heal Abel, cannot return home. Build a thesis on the novel's treatment of powerlessness as a structural condition rather than a personal failing, using Ben as your primary example.
Competing survivals: Compare Ben and Tosamah as two models of urban Native survival—private ceremonial memory versus public political performance—and evaluate which the novel ultimately endorses, if either.
Nostalgia as self-protection: Examine how Ben's idealization of reservation life allows him to avoid reckoning with the costs of his own adaptation to white urban society, and what this reveals about the psychological toll of the relocation era.