The Lone Ranger And Tonto Fistfight In Heaven Summary
In Sherman Alexie’s short story “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven”, the Native American narrator struggles to find a place where he belongs in modern white-dominated America. The story structure itself reflects the restless nature of the narrator, moving from place to place and from time to time, and allows the reader to begin to hone in on the issues that native people face in a contemporary ever-changing world. The narrator’s inner conflict manifests itself in polarizing moments of Indian against white, in both real-life situations and subconsciously through dreams. This inner conflict can be interpreted as a reflection of not just the narrator, but of Native Americans across the country. Despite hundreds of years separating
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Whether it be the gas station clerk, his girlfriend, people in their houses, or cops, they are all ever present throughout the story. Even after the narrator returns home to the Spokane Indian Reservation, he gets beaten in a basketball game by a white kid, which ends up being a tipping point in the narrator’s life. He says that the white kid “needed to be beaten by an Indian, any Indian”, in a protective way in which the basketball game was not simply a game (Alexie 13). This game was important to the narrator because it was a way for him to secure his turf, to show that his home, the reservation, could not be taken by white America and a white man in particular. However, losing the basketball game, losing against the white man, made him realize that his internal struggle against the dominant culture was in vain. No matter how much he resisted assimilating into the modern white-dominated country, there was no way to go back to the way Indian life was before colonization. This is the root to his struggles, and most likely why he leaves the reservation again to pursue a job fitting of the present world. He yearns to connect with his ancestry, to live “closer to the river, to the falls where ghosts of salmon jump” but feels as if the modern world is preventing that (Alexie 14). The story shows how everyday he is reminded that the country he lives in is no longer the country of his ancestors but now the country of the white
Whether it be the gas station clerk, his girlfriend, people in their houses, or cops, they are all ever present throughout the story. Even after the narrator returns home to the Spokane Indian Reservation, he gets beaten in a basketball game by a white kid, which ends up being a tipping point in the narrator’s life. He says that the white kid “needed to be beaten by an Indian, any Indian”, in a protective way in which the basketball game was not simply a game (Alexie 13). This game was important to the narrator because it was a way for him to secure his turf, to show that his home, the reservation, could not be taken by white America and a white man in particular. However, losing the basketball game, losing against the white man, made him realize that his internal struggle against the dominant culture was in vain. No matter how much he resisted assimilating into the modern white-dominated country, there was no way to go back to the way Indian life was before colonization. This is the root to his struggles, and most likely why he leaves the reservation again to pursue a job fitting of the present world. He yearns to connect with his ancestry, to live “closer to the river, to the falls where ghosts of salmon jump” but feels as if the modern world is preventing that (Alexie 14). The story shows how everyday he is reminded that the country he lives in is no longer the country of his ancestors but now the country of the white