Pros and Cons Part 1

So far in Ceremony, one specific detail about the story confuses me, and that is the breaks and transitions between the present and past in the story. For example, there are instances in which the present may show Tayo taking care of his animals or riding his mule, and then suddenly the story shifts to a past event for Tayo before, during, or even after the war. The events are mostly used correctly to illustrate a point about Tayo or someone/something else, but sometimes they appear in the story unexpectedly and without warning, and I require a minute or two to try and put the pieces of Tayo's chronological puzzle in the right places and place myself in the correct position in the puzzle. How should I be able to notice an important detail about Tayo in the past or present if I am constantly thrown between both of them?

One that I did notice and actually like, on the other hand, was the inclusion of old Native American rituals and ideas into the conversations about and modernized look of the the present-day world. This mainly comes into play when Tayo has trouble first getting over his sickness. Of course if he is sick, then someone should do something about it, but I find it odd that old Grandma (unknown if they are actually related so far) first suggests bringing an old medicine man. Maybe the point of it was to try and get him to remember his heritage or maybe his younger days and have that hopefully get him to feel better, but I can't say for sure. Anyway, the medicine man talks to Tayo about his experience in the war in addition to healing him, and then Tayo thinks about how the medicine man would react to the images of men killed with bullet wounds and mortars. Being a person who mainly believes in the old traditions, the medicine man would have only believed that the only ways a man could die was through old age, disease, or having an upfront confrontation in battle and losing. Tayo thinks that, if the medicine man was in his place on the front lines, he would see all those corpses and believe they were all killed by upfront confrontation. I find this to be an interesting way of looking at a modernized world, and I am pretty sure that I will see more of this as I progress through the story.