Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977) depict the trauma suffered by two male veterans of war: Septimus Warren Smith, an English veteran of the First World War, and Tayo, a Laguna Pueblo man who fought in the Pacific Islands during World War Two. Both young men return from war psychologically and emotionally shattered. Each has witnessed the brutal death of a man he loved; each suffers from flashbacks and hallucinations; each contends with guilt and self-accusations; and each confronts doctors unable or unwilling to administer proper treatment. Both characters also have disorienting urban experiences and sense a fraught connection with the natural world. Complicating their trauma is their inability to fulfill Western culture's proscribed gender roles. In addition, Mrs. Dalloway and Ceremony share stylistic similarities in their shifts in space, time, and perspective—anti-authoritarian narrative modes that help develop their comparable themes. The novels diverge when Septimus commits suicide and Tayo begins to heal after re-immersing himself in Laguna culture and accepting his biracial identity. In Paula Gunn Allen's estimation, Ceremony is “a tale of two forces: the feminine life force of the universe and the mechanistic death force of the witchery” (119). The same might be said of Mrs. Dalloway, where the witchery, the patriarchal social structure, insists that violence, killing, and warfare are natural, necessary occurrences. Both novels strive to reject the witchery and highlight feminine principles as keys to psychological and cultural health.

Early in Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus sits in Regent's Park with his Italian wife, Rezia. We learn that he had eagerly enlisted in the army and now suffers from shell-shock, caused in part by watching his beloved commanding officer, Evans, get blown to bits. Back in England, he is unable to summon what his doctors consider normal feelings, such as sexual desire towards his wife, yet he feels with excruciating sensitivity that “leaves were alive; trees were alive. And the leaves [were] connected by millions of fibres with his own body” (MD 22). His eyes well with tears as he sees “inexhaustible charity and laughing goodness one shape after another of unimaginable beauty” in the “smoke words” of the skywriting airplane that he believes is signaling him (MD 21).