The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
by Sherman Alexie
This is a collection of interconnected stories of Native Americans living on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Within each story, it shows what each Native American character goes through on a daily basis. The interconnection of these stories help show each character's perspective and helps the reader understand the reasoning for most actions. This book shows the heartache, hardship, and struggles that these Native Americans daily face. This book also shows the hope in these Native American's hearts and their fight to survive.
"It's hard to be optimistic on the reservation. When a glass sits on a table here,
people don't wonder if it's half filled or half empty. They just hope it's good beer.
Still, Indians have a way of surviving. But it's almost like Indians can survive the big stuff.
Mass murder, loss of language and land rights. It's the small things that hurt the most.
the white waitress who wouldn't take an order, Tonto, the Washington Redskins." (Alexie 49)
The novel is a representation of the actual lives and thoughts of Native American's living on a reservation. The stories are all told by different points of views which all show some form of hope. The hope that one day a person will be able to rise above the Native American hardships and their forms of dealing with it, drinking and drugs, to be a hero and a role model for the younger generation. This book gives a view of the Native American culture different from the normal societal view. It exposes what Native Americans are still struggling with after their land and lifestyles were taken and pressured to be changed.
This novel serves to be culturally relevant by exposing the reading a character similar to them in age and gender (especially boys), but draws a connection to this culture. It helps the reader gain an understanding of what a young Native American male faces and can draw a connection to their own lives. Basketball is a topic frequently brought up and for a preteen/teenage boy to read this they might be able to really connect it to their own life. In hopes of them reading this, they might be able to see the hardships and struggles that these Native American boys face in comparison to what they daily face.
My Review of a Review
After reading Denise Low's article on The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fight in Heaven, it is easy to see her support of the novel and its ability to create a human voice underlying the surface of the text. She has done her research and points out moments of the book that portray the sad but true reality while being framed with irony. She emphasizes the irony weaved through the entire book and through this article helps express to a reader that may not have noticed the irony a different, deeper perspective on the novel.
Denise Low states about Sherman Alexie's way of writing in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven that his "aggregative technique of writing uses many vignettes that add up to a new kind of written story telling that come often-too-close to the truth." With which I agree, through out the novel situations were not sugar coated to create a happy ending. When writing about a culture that fighting to stay alive, the amount of stories with happy endings are limited, quoting the narrator in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven "there are all kinds of wars" (Alexie 121).
Low talks through the novel pointing out sections of the book that emphasize the reality and "the human voice" that she and other readers can connect and identify with. Low commends Sherman Alexie on the ability to expose the harsh reality but with the ability to lighten it by self-mocking and ironic humor.
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fight in Heaven
By Denise Low
Peter Burger, in Theory of the Avant-Garde, notes that artistic works reflect the time and place, or history, of their cultures, "the unfolding of object and the elaboration of categories are connected" (p. 16). Sherman Alexie's short stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven could not have been written during any other period of history. The twenty-two short tales read like a casebook of postmodernist theory-beyond surrealism and absurdity, and certainly beyond classicism. Irony, pastiche, and mingling of popular cultures occur throughout the book.
David Lehman gives one of the most succinct definitions of the cultural event called postmodernism in the Associated Writing Programs Chronicle: It revels in comedy and exalts the spirit of parody and play. It treats the monuments of tradition in particular with jubilant irreverence. The distinction between artifacts of high and low culture gets leveled. Characters and lives are confused. Poems based on intricate rules are written in a kind of partnership with the language, an attempt to bring out the poetry latent in the language rather than to impose meaning on language .... Postmodernism is the triumph of irony.
Alexie's Native American characters journey through a collage of urban and reservation referents. Postmodernism is the technique of communicationas well as survival-in this simulated world that resembles Washington state. Underlying the surface of text, though, is a very human voice.
Irony frames every piece in the book. In the story "A Drug Called Tradition," the narrator tells of Thomas Builds-the-Fire's party, financed by lease money from a utility company, "When Indians make lots of money from corporations that way, we can all hear our ancestors laughing in the trees. But we never can tell whether they're laughing at the Indians or the whites" (p. 13). Much of the lease money will go for beer, and the destructive effects of alcohol are explicated in many of the stories.
Another painfully ironic tale is "Indian Education," with vignettes for each grade, first through twelfth. Some of the best writing is in this story, so each section reads like a prose poem. Each uses the ironic situation of an Indian child within a non-Indian institution. Here the narrator parodies the traditional Spokane way of naming children, "I was always falling down; my Indian name was Junior Falls Down. Sometimes it was Bloody Nose or StealHis-Lunch. Once, it was Cries-Like-a-White-Boy, even though none of us had seen a white boy cry" (p. 172). These names reflect incidents of violence against the child, lightened by the self-mocking, ironic humor.
Alexie makes light of traditions of all kinds. Quilts are used as a background to "A Good Story," and the story's whimsical effect comes from its pieced-together structure. Crazy Horse is the namesake of "Crazy Horse Dreams," but here the Sioux leader is not an inspiration, but a symbol of failure. When the character Victor tries to make love to a woman at a powwow, he falters, "His hands were small. Somehow she was still waiting for Crazy Horse" (p. 40). He knows the woman's sexual fantasy, "She thought she could watch him fancydance, watch his calf muscles grow more and more perfect with each step. She thought he was Crazy Horse" (p. 41). Victor cannot measure up to the idealized hero in any part of his life. In another story, the narrator imagines that Crazy Horse invented the atomic bomb. This displacement of histories emphasizes the failure of contemporary warriors.
Other cultural icons in the collection include Jimi Hendrix, Jesus Christ, and the Lone Ranger and Tonto. They all blur together as equivalent cultural images. In "Jesus Christ's Half-Brother Is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation," the narrator takes responsibility for an orphaned baby and takes on Christ-like characteristics. In the title story, the narrator and his white paramour play out the roles of Tonto and the Lone Ranger. These and other images mix in Alexie's prose to form a postmodernist backdrop of real and imagined people. They work together in the imagination to create the media-permeated scenery of the latter twentieth century.
Alexie's other writings are essays and poetry, including the acclaimed book of verse, The Business of Fancydancing. The imprint of the poet's training is apparent here in the fine tuning of language. The ending of the story "Family Portrait" shows Alexie at his best as he describes tragedy in everyday terms:
The television was always loud, too loud, until every emotion was measured by the half hour. We hid our faces behind masks that suggested other histories; we touched hands accidentally and our skin sparked like a personal revolution. We stared across the room at each other, waited for the conversation and the conversion, watched wasps and flies battering against the windows. We were children; we were open mouths. Open in hunger, in anger, in laughter, in prayer. Jesus, we all want to survive. (p. 198)
The images of television noise, masks, insects at the windows, and children's open mouths make this a word-painting about loneliness. "Jesus" in the last line is both a plea and a curse word.
Throughout the book, the lyrical strain gives the disparate stories a continuity, even though different characters take on the role of narrator. This underlying voice lends a tone of compassion that takes away the emotional distancing of irony. By the end of the book, readers care about Thomas-theFire, Norma Many Horses, Uncle Moses, and Victor. They care about people who laugh and age and keep trying.
Alexie ruptures narratives, confuses human and fictitious people, pastiches images, and plays with illusion. Like authors Gerald Vizenor, Ray Young Bear, and Adrian Louis, he ranges across all of Indian country. Along the way he does not leave out television, Seven-Eleven stores, or other institutions of contemporary pan-Indian life. The aggregative technique of writing uses many vignettes that add up to a new kind of written storytelling that comes-often-too close to the truth.
Copyright University of Nebraska Press Winter 1996
Works Cited
Alexie, Sherman. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1993. Print.
Peter Burger, in Theory of the Avant-Garde, notes that artistic works reflect the time and place, or history, of their cultures, "the unfolding of object and the elaboration of categories are connected" (p. 16). Sherman Alexie's short stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven could not have been written during any other period of history. The twenty-two short tales read like a casebook of postmodernist theory-beyond surrealism and absurdity, and certainly beyond classicism. Irony, pastiche, and mingling of popular cultures occur throughout the book.
David Lehman gives one of the most succinct definitions of the cultural event called postmodernism in the Associated Writing Programs Chronicle: It revels in comedy and exalts the spirit of parody and play. It treats the monuments of tradition in particular with jubilant irreverence. The distinction between artifacts of high and low culture gets leveled. Characters and lives are confused. Poems based on intricate rules are written in a kind of partnership with the language, an attempt to bring out the poetry latent in the language rather than to impose meaning on language .... Postmodernism is the triumph of irony.
Alexie's Native American characters journey through a collage of urban and reservation referents. Postmodernism is the technique of communicationas well as survival-in this simulated world that resembles Washington state. Underlying the surface of text, though, is a very human voice.
Irony frames every piece in the book. In the story "A Drug Called Tradition," the narrator tells of Thomas Builds-the-Fire's party, financed by lease money from a utility company, "When Indians make lots of money from corporations that way, we can all hear our ancestors laughing in the trees. But we never can tell whether they're laughing at the Indians or the whites" (p. 13). Much of the lease money will go for beer, and the destructive effects of alcohol are explicated in many of the stories.
Another painfully ironic tale is "Indian Education," with vignettes for each grade, first through twelfth. Some of the best writing is in this story, so each section reads like a prose poem. Each uses the ironic situation of an Indian child within a non-Indian institution. Here the narrator parodies the traditional Spokane way of naming children, "I was always falling down; my Indian name was Junior Falls Down. Sometimes it was Bloody Nose or StealHis-Lunch. Once, it was Cries-Like-a-White-Boy, even though none of us had seen a white boy cry" (p. 172). These names reflect incidents of violence against the child, lightened by the self-mocking, ironic humor.
Alexie makes light of traditions of all kinds. Quilts are used as a background to "A Good Story," and the story's whimsical effect comes from its pieced-together structure. Crazy Horse is the namesake of "Crazy Horse Dreams," but here the Sioux leader is not an inspiration, but a symbol of failure. When the character Victor tries to make love to a woman at a powwow, he falters, "His hands were small. Somehow she was still waiting for Crazy Horse" (p. 40). He knows the woman's sexual fantasy, "She thought she could watch him fancydance, watch his calf muscles grow more and more perfect with each step. She thought he was Crazy Horse" (p. 41). Victor cannot measure up to the idealized hero in any part of his life. In another story, the narrator imagines that Crazy Horse invented the atomic bomb. This displacement of histories emphasizes the failure of contemporary warriors.
Other cultural icons in the collection include Jimi Hendrix, Jesus Christ, and the Lone Ranger and Tonto. They all blur together as equivalent cultural images. In "Jesus Christ's Half-Brother Is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation," the narrator takes responsibility for an orphaned baby and takes on Christ-like characteristics. In the title story, the narrator and his white paramour play out the roles of Tonto and the Lone Ranger. These and other images mix in Alexie's prose to form a postmodernist backdrop of real and imagined people. They work together in the imagination to create the media-permeated scenery of the latter twentieth century.
Alexie's other writings are essays and poetry, including the acclaimed book of verse, The Business of Fancydancing. The imprint of the poet's training is apparent here in the fine tuning of language. The ending of the story "Family Portrait" shows Alexie at his best as he describes tragedy in everyday terms:
The television was always loud, too loud, until every emotion was measured by the half hour. We hid our faces behind masks that suggested other histories; we touched hands accidentally and our skin sparked like a personal revolution. We stared across the room at each other, waited for the conversation and the conversion, watched wasps and flies battering against the windows. We were children; we were open mouths. Open in hunger, in anger, in laughter, in prayer. Jesus, we all want to survive. (p. 198)
The images of television noise, masks, insects at the windows, and children's open mouths make this a word-painting about loneliness. "Jesus" in the last line is both a plea and a curse word.
Throughout the book, the lyrical strain gives the disparate stories a continuity, even though different characters take on the role of narrator. This underlying voice lends a tone of compassion that takes away the emotional distancing of irony. By the end of the book, readers care about Thomas-theFire, Norma Many Horses, Uncle Moses, and Victor. They care about people who laugh and age and keep trying.
Alexie ruptures narratives, confuses human and fictitious people, pastiches images, and plays with illusion. Like authors Gerald Vizenor, Ray Young Bear, and Adrian Louis, he ranges across all of Indian country. Along the way he does not leave out television, Seven-Eleven stores, or other institutions of contemporary pan-Indian life. The aggregative technique of writing uses many vignettes that add up to a new kind of written storytelling that comes-often-too close to the truth.
No comments:
Post a Comment