The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (Criticism)

Criticism

Chris Semansky

Semansky is an instructor of English literature and composition and writes on literature and culture for several publications. In this essay, Semansky considers the role of storytelling in Alexie's stories.

In oral cultures, storytelling is the primary means by which history and tradition are passed from generation to generation. Alexie foregrounds the role of storytelling in his writing, however, not only as a means by which Native Americans can keep their collective memories alive, but also as a way that individuals can survive the daily assaults of Eurocentric culture on their imaginations and sensibilities. More often than not, rather than presenting a chronological narrative of events as one expects in conventional stories, Alexie's "stories" evoke states of mind and grapple with the numerous and conflicting representations vying for attention in the contemporary mind.

In her review of the collection in American Indian Quarterly, Denise Low writes, "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." Low is alluding not only to the numerous references Alexie makes to popular culture such as 7-11 stores, television shows, and baseball celebrities such as Pete Rose, but also to the peculiar condition in which Native Americans find themselves in the late twentieth century, having to constantly renegotiate their identity among the welter of conflicting signs that saturate their lives.

These signs are everywhere, in the image of Indians on television shows such as The Lone Ranger, in history books and in popular movies like Dances With Wolves, that attempt to portray "real" Indians, and they exist in the tribal lore that inhabits the imagination of Native Americans themselves. Living on the reservation, segregated from white American culture at large, but vulnerable to its relentless sign system and its (mis)representations of Indians, Alexie's characters battle to achieve some sense of authenticity in a world where that very notion has become suspect. The fractured narratives and stories inside stories emphasize the desperation and urgency that drive these characters in their search for meaning.

One way his characters cultivate meaning is by mythologizing the reservation and its inhabitants. In "The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Don't Flash Red Anymore," Victor and Adrian practice this brand of storytelling in their discussions of basketball talent on the reservation. They focus on Julius Windmaker, "the latest thing in a long line of reservation basketball heroes," who "had that gift, that grace, those fingers like a goddam medicine man." In his study of Alexie in Contemporary American Literature, Kenneth Millard writes that this story "establishes the reservation in terms of a community of shared hardship where stories of survival help to protect Indians from erosion and disappearance." Erosion comes from within and without. As more and more Indians leave the reservation, ties to community and family are broken, and those who remain must battle alcohol, a crippling sense of stagnation, and an increasing isolation from the "outside" world. Adrian and Victor retain hope for life on the reservation by building myths around gifted individuals. Seemingly insignificant events such as a few minutes of a high school basketball game take on epic proportions each time Julius's story is retold. By creating contemporary myths around living Indians, the two keep alive the hope that conditions can change and that individuals can transcend their bleak circumstances.

Mythologizing takes on other forms as well. In "Jesus Christ's Half-Brother Is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation," the narrator adopts a baby, James, after its parents have died in a fire. The baby does not walk or talk until the Christmas of his seventh year. When he finally speaks, he speaks with the wisdom of an elder:

He says so many things and the only thing that matters is that he says he and I don't have the right to die for each other and that we should be living for each other instead. He says the world hurts. He says the first thing he wanted after he was born was a shot of whiskey. He says all that and more. He tells me to get a job and to grow my braids. He says I better learn how to shoot left-handed if I'm going to keep playing basketball. He says to open a fireworks stand.

Full of practical advice that counter ideas often associated with Christianity, James directly responds to the Christian notion that Christ died for the sins of humankind so that human beings may live, by telling the narrator that "we should be living for each other instead." By mythologizing James as someone who is more interested in helping Indians survive this world than he is in saving their souls for the next world, Alexie responds to the Christian missionaries who were so prevalent on reservations and who helped run their schools. It is James who literally saves the narrator from the ravages of alcoholism, as he is forced to give up the bottle if he is to keep custody of the child. Even Alcoholics Anonymous, which the narrator joins, is built upon the act of storytelling, as members meet to tell stories about how alcohol has ruined their lives and how they are going to stop drinking and change their lives. By listening to the stories of others and telling one's own story, members of AA derive the strength to stay sober.

The idea of salvation is at the heart of storytelling in Alexie's stories — salvation from one's own destructive impulses, salvation from the appropriation of Native-American history and traditions by others, salvation from the onslaught of technology that supplants human connectedness and colonizes family life. A year after he quits drinking, the narrator of "Jesus Christ's Half-Brother Is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation," says, "Every day I'm trying not to drink and I pray but I don't know who I'm praying to." Storytelling is akin to praying in these stories. The act alone is enough. In "The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire," inspired by Franz Kafka's novel, The Trial, Thomas, after being convicted of absurd charges, finds himself on a bus with convicts heading to prison. After being prodded, he begins to tell his stories, just as he had done at his trial. Thomas is both a tribal visionary and a walking archive of Spokane Indian history, and in Alexie's ironic representations of Indian culture, a parody of the modern Indian who cannot stop talking about his Indian identity and his tribal past. In "Family Portrait," the narrator describes television as a force that eats into his family's emotional life, and something they need to be saved from:

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.

There are so many similarities between the characters in Alexie's stories and Alexie's own life that the collection can also be seen as Alexie's attempt to tell the story of his life by mythologizing it. Such self-mythologizing has become a staple of postmodern writing and can be seen in writers as diverse as John Berryman, Mark Strand, Ann Sexton, Gerald Vizenor, and Mark Leyner. At a time when many consider literary realism to be antiquated and an insufficient way to depict how people live now, creating mythologies around and of oneself has become an effective and provocative way to depict reality.

Source: Chris Semansky, Critical Essay on The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.

What Do I Read Next?

• Alexie's novel Reservation Blues (1995) solidified his reputation as one of America's strongest writers. Alexie draws on the Faust legend in telling the story of an Indian blues band called Coyote Springs.
• N. Scott Momaday's Pulitzer Prize – winning first novel, House Made of Dawn (1968), helped pave the way for other Native-American writers such as Alexie. The novel tells the story of a Tano Indian named Abel who returns from World War II army service to his home in New Mexico. Momaday charts Abel's struggles to reaffirm the ways of his people while living in a world often antagonistic towards those ways.
• Megatrends 2000: Ten New Directions for the 1990s (1990), written by John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene, provides a social forecast for the 1990s, describing trends and their contexts, including the emergence of free-market socialism, global lifestyles, and cultural nationalism.
• American Indian Myths and Legends (1985), edited by Alfonso Ortiz and Richard Erdoes, gathers 160 tales from 80 tribal groups to survey the rich Native-American mythic heritage.
• Manners & Customs of the Coeur d'Alene Indians (1975), by Jerome Peltier, is a useful introduction to the customs of Alexie's tribe.