The Lone Ranger and Tonto fistfight in heaven

Introduction

Sherman Alexie's work "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven" represents a collection of short stories that are interconnected. The focus of each story is on the life of a Native American living on an Indian reservation. Alexie uses a protagonist to centralize the work. Thomas Builds-the-Fire is eccentric, but a good storyteller. His voice is heard throughout the stories. Alexie also shifts perspectives when he inserts Victor Joseph, a character who is cynical about life and embittered by his childhood experiences; his attempts to enter the white man's world fail and he subsequently becomes an emotional victim (McFarland, 27). Whereas most of the stories are told from the perspective of Thomas, Victor's story is presented in first-person narration. Most of the other stories in Alexie's work are told from third-person omniscient narration. With this context in mind, "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven" is structured into three short stories and all tend to center on the theme of the abuse of alcohol. Major themes of the work also include post colonialism, language, psychological abuse of Native Americans, and imagination.

This book is a collection of stories which revolves around downtrodden has-beens and their mishaps on the Spokane Indian Reservation. The main characters are a group of men dealing with their woeful struggles: Alcoholism, failed marriage and their ex-stardom. Thomas-Builds-the-Fire was a great storyteller who has been forgotten and ignored by the people on the reservation. Junior's life has fallen apart ever since his wife left him. Victor was a well-known basketball player and legend on the court who is now trying to keep sober. Even though this is a depressing subject, Sherman Alexie manages to make this book funny and include many dark but humorous moments (Dix, 155).

Situations

Set on the Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern Washington State, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is a collection of loosely related stories featuring a recurring cast of characters. In these twenty-two stories, the young male protagonists, usually in their late teens or their twenties, struggle with poverty, alcoholism, and the despair of everyday life on and off the reservation. They also try to come to grips with what it means to be Indian (as the characters exclusively refer to themselves) in the late twentieth century. Though these situations have no chronological order, vary wildly in style, and use different narrators, the author manages, with thin plots, sketchy characterization, and “artless” language, to build stories of great cumulative power and understanding (Low, 123). The reader is well advised to read the book through to experience the full effect.

Situations 1

The first situation in the collection, “Every Little Hurricane,” describes a New Year's Eve party as seen through the eyes of nine-year-old Victor. Images of bad weather metaphorically represent the emotional storms of the party, where Victor's drunken uncles, Adolph and Arnold, fight viciously for no apparent reason. “He could see his uncles slugging each other with such force that they had to be ...