Sherman Alexie's Flight Essay

The novel Flight by Sherman Alexie is a story about a time traveling Indian foster kid who goes to shoot up a bank, but instead he gets transported through time and receives valuable lessons on how to deal with his main issue of abandonment. Every time he leaps into a new body the lessons get progressively difficult. Yet when he jumps into the last body, he must face the person that he blames the most, his father.

In the beginning of the novel Zits has a lot of resentment towards the people that abandoned him especially towards his father. The fury Zits has towards his father for abandoning him and his mother when he was born is made clear when he states, “My father was a drunk, too, more in love with beer than with my mother and me. He vanishes

Zits gains his second lesson when he falls into a little Indian boy’s body, he was given the choice to get revenge against a white soldier, but Zits chooses not to get revenge because he doesn’t want to blame other people for his loneliness like he did when he shot up the bank. When Zits leaps into the third body, Gus, who leads a military unit to an Indian camp where they are going to kill out of revenge, but zits doesn’t want to kill anyone, so he tries to mislead them but fails and ends up involved in the charge towards the camp. During the charge he sees a soldier going against his orders to help an Indian boy escape, he wishes he could be as exceptional as the solider, so then he decides to help the soldier escape even though the solider was ordered to kill he decided to do what he thought was right, so zits decides to do the same and helps them. Zits learns that you need to do the right thing even if it means sacrificing yourself for others. The fourth body zits jumps into is Jimmy a person who was betrayed by a close friend who he taught how to fly and in return he used his skills to crash a plane into Seattle, Jimmy then turns that betrayal towards his wife by seeing another woman. What Zits picks up from this experience is