Miranda Ciraolo Prof. McGeachy The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven The Narrator’s Negativity In The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie, the narrator is a young Native American man with a very negative outlook on the world. Although his name is never mentioned, likely to show how unimportant he feels, the narrator indirectly shares quite a bit about his personality. He has a strong negativity towards himself and the world for multiple reasons. People close to him, such as his mother and his girlfriend, probably play a role in this negativity. His negativity is also worsened by his own views on his ethnicity, and working the graveyard-shift, therefore losing sleep. Even while he is sleeping, the narrator’s …show more content…
negativity plays out in his dreams. His negativity is putting a damper on his life and his ability to be successful. The narrator of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven gives the reader a very negative opinion of his Native American ethnicity. The narrator doesn’t know how other people perceive him, however he makes rash assumptions. The narrator say the 7-11 clerk “knew this dark skin and long black hair of mine was dangerous. I had potential.” (183). When the narrator walks into the 7-11 on Third Avenue he just assumes that the store clerk there thinks that he is dangerous. We never actually get the thoughts of the clerk at the 7-11 or anyone else in the story. The narrator does this because he has a negative outlook on the history of his people. He believes that because in their past, the United States government has treated them unfairly that the general public in the present day will still do the same. He discusses treaties that have been unfairly made or even treaties that have not been followed by comparison “Like adding a clause onto a treaty. We’ll take Washington and Oregon and you get six pine trees and a brand-new Cordoba.”(183-84). He is clearly bitter about the fact that in the past, The United States Government has, on many occasions, been horribly unfair to the Native populations, however, 1these instances have died down tremendously by the time of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. There have been many horrendous occurrences between the Native Americans and the United States in the past, such as the trail of tears. In 1838 the United States forced approximately 16,000 Cherokee people from their lands. These people came from Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, and Georgia and were sent to reservations in what is presently Oklahoma. Thousands of Native Americans died during this tragic trip. The Native populations were even further reduced after they arrived in Oklahoma because there were not enough resources in the area to support the amount of people living there. The narrator in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven in Heaven also tends to be up all night, sometimes working the graveyard-shift and loose a significant amount of sleep because of it.
He says “I worked the graveyard for a Seattle 7-11 and got robbed once too often.”(181). When the narrator goes into the 7-11 on Third Avenue during the grave yard shift, he describes all graveyard-shift workers to the reader. When he does this, he is really describing himself in a way, which gives the reader the sense of the narrator’s true self-image. He describes graveyard-shift workers as having “Acne scars and a bad haircut, workpants that showed off his white socks and those cheap black shoes that have no support” (181). The narrator knew this life of the graveyard-shift worker all too well because it had been him at one point. He goes on to explain how his “arches still ache” from when he worked the graveyard-shift at the 7-11 in Seattle (181). Loss of sleep can cause many physical and mental health issues. Loss of sleep is common and natural in people who work, particularly, the graveyard-shift. However, it also occurs in those who work evening shifts, or those who tend to change shifts regularly. This loss of sleep is caused by the body’s circadian rhythms. This circadian rhythm is commonly referred to as you body’s biological clock. This controls things inside your body including body temperature, alertness, and release of hormones. The brain does this to …show more content…
adjust for what we should be doing for a particular time of day. For example, Melatonin is a hormone that is released by the brain at night. It appears to have a strong link to the sleep/wake cycle. Its release is regulated by an area of the brain that serves as your body clock. Melatonin is released by your body at night because that is when your body should be asleep, which will cause graveyard-shift workers to be sleepy while at work, and not be able to sleep as well while they are not working because of this lack of melatonin being released when they are trying to sleep. Sleepiness has been shown to have negative effects on a person’s attention, concentration, reaction time, memory, and mood. (UCLA) This is likely something that is having a strong effect on the narrator of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. His girlfriend even tells him “’you get too angry”’ (182). This could easily be because of his negative mood changes. Working this graveyard-shift can also cause a person to feel disconnected from their friends and family and others that they care about. (UCLA) This is because while everyone else is enjoying time together, the graveyard-shift worker will either be asleep or working. The narrator talks about this when he describes the 7-11 clerk worker as being “misplaced and marked by loneliness” (183). The narrator is primarily describing himself because he is suffering from his own internal issues which cause this extreme feeling of loneliness. It is not only the narrator effecting his own moods and negativity, but also the people who he cares about most in his life. His girlfriend who he fights with constantly can cause some of the negativity that tends to swallow the narrator. He describes their constant arguments to be “just as damaging as a fist” (185). She always knew what to say to hurt him, as the ones closest to you usually do. When his girlfriend said these hurtful things to the narrator, it probably lowered his self-esteem significantly. It hurts the most when someone you love says hurtful things to you. The narrator’s mother was also one of the closest people to him. She always has his best interest in mind. His mother, while thinking she was just helping him, “would circle the want ads in red” and give the paper to him (187). His mother thought she was helping him by trying to help find him a job. However, this may have been bringing more negativity to him. She may have been indirectly sending a message that he was a disappointment because he’s not working. The narrator’s fixation on death significantly shows how he is negative towards the world.
His brain seems to be fixated on death, consciously and unconsciously. He talks about it as well as dreams about it. It is particularly interesting that when he dreams, he dies in his dream, and that it is caused by his girlfriend. In his dream, they “fell in love and tried to keep it a secret.” But they got caught “fucking in the barn” and the narrator got shot. At the end of the dream, he died and his “soul drifted above the reservation. During this out of body experience, he “could see everything that was happening. Whites killing Indians and Indians killing whites” (186). When you dream of your own death, it often means that you are anxious or angry. However when you dream of your own death, it usually means that you are letting go of an old stage in your life.(SmartGirl) Similar to how soon after having these dreams, the narrator left his girlfriend and Seattle and went back home to the reservation. However, when you die slowly as the narrator did in the first dream he tells us about, it means that you need to reenergize your life. (SmartGirl) It is clear that the narrator definitely needs to change something that is going on in his life, so this is true for him. He has another dream in which “three mounted soldiers played polo with a dead Indian woman’s head” (186). When the death of a loved one appears in a dream, it can suggest that you are lacking a certain
quality that the loved one represents. (SmartGirl) Although this dead Indian woman is not necessarily a loved one, she probably represents that the narrator is lacking his Native culture because he is living with his white girlfriend in Seattle. When the narrator reads an old newspaper, it is interesting that things that he picks out. The articles he point out in the paper are “another civil war, another terrorist bomb exploded and one more plane crashed and all aboard were presumed dead” (187). This ultimately shows his negativity towards the world. Of all of the stories that were probably in that newspaper, he picked out the most horrendous to mention. There were probably good stories in the paper, perhaps a sports team won, or some kids in the neighborhood doing some kind of community service, but this is not what he radiates towards. This negativity will continue to limit the narrator as he moves forth in his life if he does not change it. However, it is a question of whether he is choosing to be this negative or if he just simply got stuck this way. The narrator’s negativity is not only limiting his own achievements in life, but it is also limiting the success of those around him. As his dreams are trying to tell him, the narrator is in need of a reenergize in his life.
My initial response to the poem was a deep sense of empathy. This indicated to me the way the man’s body was treated after he had passed. I felt sorry for him as the poet created the strong feeling that he had a lonely life. It told us how his body became a part of the land and how he added something to the land around him after he died.
In the short stories “A Drug Called Tradition,” “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor,” and “The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore” collected in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, author Sherman Alexie uses humor to reflect the life on the Spokane Reservation. In “A Drug Called Tradition,” the story starts with a joke by having Thomas sit down inside a refrigerator in response to Junior’s comment as to why the refrigerator is empty. The Indians are having a party hosted by Thomas, who gets a lot of money from a corporation for leasing some of his land. Alexie’s three second selves, Victor, Junior, and Thomas, later go to the Benjamin Lake and use the drug that Victor brings with him. In “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor,” Jimmy Many Horses, who suffers from terminal cancer, humorously describes his tumors to his wife, Norma, who cannot bear Jimmy’s humor and leaves him. At the end, Norma comes back to Jimmy because the person she lives with is too serious. In “The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore,” Victor and Adrian talk about the basketball stars on the reservation, hoping that someone on the reservation can resist alcohol and develop his or her basketball skills to be a successful ballplayer. The function of Alexie’s humor shifts throughout his stories. In “A Drug Called Tradition,” Alexie’s humor effectively accomplishes one of his goals by obliging readers to reconsider their concepts, while his humor helps his characters improve their situations in “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor.” In “The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore,” humor mitigates the characters’ pain and despair. One common function hum...
We have all been alienated, stereotyped, and felt the general loss of control at one point in our lives, weather you are black, native American, Hispanic, or white. Race, skin color or nationality does not matter. This is the reoccurring theme in both of the text, “Women Hollering Creek” and “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven”. Women Hollering Creek is a story by Sandra Cisneros a noted Mexican novelist, poet, short story writer, and essayist (b. 1954). It is a story of a young Mexican girl Cleofilas, who with visions of grandeur leaves her family to marry a man she barely knows and begin a new life across the border in the United States. The second short story is by Sherman Alexie (b. 1966) who was born on a reservation to Native American parents. This story is about the struggles of a Native American man who tries to disprove the stereotypical view society has of Native Americans, and to fit into society outside of the reservation. In one way or another, both characters in these texts have experienced being singled out and made to feel as though they did not fit in.
Sherman Alexie could possibly be the most realistic man on the planet. In his book, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven, Alexie uses short stories to paint a picture of his childhood growing up on an Indian reservation. Through a web of characters a saddening image is created with overriding themes of alcoholism, racism, distrust and failure. This image has become greatly controversial because of the stereotypical way it portrays the Spokane Indian tribe. Even though Alexie is himself a Spokane some may say that he was out of line in the depiction of his people; however, Alexie is simply a realist relaying information from his upbringing to the world. He tells not only of the bad but also of the good times on the reservation,
A horrific aspect of life that many people have a difficult time dealing with is death. The thought of death scares people because as humans we do not have a way to comprehend something that we cannot test, see or even have a grasp of. When a person loses a loved one they get scared by this reality of that they do not know where they are going and when they make it there how will it be for them. In William Faulkner's book, As I Lay Dying, we go through the process at which a family loses a “loved” one and we follow the family all the way until the deceased, Addie Burden, is buried in Jefferson. In As I Lay Dying you see the steps of grieving are different for many people and some of the people will come out destroyed and others without a scratch. The character Cash goes through a process of grief, odd to most in his way of grief we do not see pain because of the pressure he puts on himself to finish the journey for the family. Cash’s brother, Jewel, seems to snap from the pain of losing his mother and he let the pain ingulf his life. Finally, the last
Culture has the power and ability to give someone spiritual and emotional distinction which shapes one's identity. Without culture society would be less and less diverse. Culture is what gives this earth warmth and color that expands across miles and miles. The author of “The School Days of an Indian Girl”, Zitkala Sa, incorporates the ideals of her Native American culture into her writing. Similarly, Sherman Alexie sheds light onto the hardships he struggled through growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in his book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven in a chapter titled “Indian Education”. While both Zitkala Sa and Sherman Alexie were Native Americans, and take on a similar persona showcasing their native culture in their text, the two diverge in the situations that they face. Zitkala Sa’s writing takes on a more timid shade as she is incorporated into the “white” culture, whereas Alexie more boldly and willingly immerses himself into the culture of the white man. One must leave something in order to realize how
James Baldwin had a talent of being able to tell a personal story and relate it to world events. His analysis is a rare capability that one can only acquire over an extensive lifetime. James Baldwin not only has that ability, but also the ability to write as if he is conversing with the reader. One of his most famous essays, “Notes of a Native Son,” is about his father’s death. It includes the events that happened prior to and following his father’s death. Throughout this essay, he brings his audience into the time in which he wrote and explains what is going on by portraying the senses and emotions of not only himself, but as well as the people involved. This essay has a very personal feeling mixed with public views. Baldwin is able to take one small event or idea and shows its place within the “bigger picture.” Not only does he illustrate public experiences, but he will also give his own personal opinion about those events. Throughout “Notes of a Native Son” Baldwin uses the binary of life versus death to expand on the private versus public binary that he also creates. These two binaries show up several times together showing how much they relate to each other.
“...Put your pistol to your head and go to Fiddlers’ Green.” Throughout literary history, epic stories of heroes dying for their gods and their countries have called men to battle and romanticized death, but Langston Hughes approaches the subject in a different way. He addresses death as a concept throughout much of his work. From his allusions to the inevitability of death to his thoughts on the inherent injustice in death, the concept of human mortality is well addressed within his works. In Hughes’ classic work, “Poem to a Dead Soldier,” he describes death in quite unflattering terms as he profusely apologizes to a soldier sent to fight and die for his country.
Death has feelings as much as any human, imagining, getting bored, distracted, and especially wondering (350, 243, 1, 375 respectively). Odd, one could say for an eternal metaphysical being. But then again, not that queer once having considered how Death spends his time. He is there at the dying of every light, that moment that the soul departs its physical shell, and sees the beauty or horror of that moment. Where to a human witnessing a death first hand (even on a much more detached level than our narrator) can easily be a life changing event, Death is forced to witness these passings for nearly every moment of his eternal life. Emotional overload or philosophical catalyst? Death gains his unique perspective on life through his many experiences with the slowly closing eyelids and muttered last words. Yet in this...
Alexie Sherman’s, “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” displays the complications and occasional distress in the relationship between Native-American people and the United States. Despite being aboriginal inhabitants of America, even in present day United States there is still tension between the rest of the country, specifically mainstream white America, and the Native-American population. Several issues regarding the treatment of Native-Americans are major problems presently. Throughout the narrative, several important symbols are mentioned. The title itself represents the struggles between mainstream America and Native-Americans. The theme of racism, violence, and prejudice is apparent throughout the story. Although the author
Death can both be a painful and serious topic, but in the hands of the right poet it can be so natural and eloquently put together. This is the case in The Sleeper by Edgar Allan Poe, as tackles the topic of death in an uncanny way. This poem is important, because it may be about the poet’s feelings towards his mother’s death, as well as a person who is coming to terms with a loved ones passing. In the poem, Poe presents a speaker who uses various literary devices such as couplet, end-stopped line, alliteration, image, consonance, and apostrophe to dramatize coming to terms with the death of a loved one.
The speaker started the poem by desiring the privilege of death through the use of similes, metaphors, and several other forms of language. As the events progress, the speaker gradually changes their mind because of the many complications that death evokes. The speaker is discontent because of human nature; the searching for something better, although there is none. The use of language throughout this poem emphasized these emotions, and allowed the reader the opportunity to understand what the speaker felt.
dream and what could happen in the end of that dream. He died on the
...n with death. His fascination with death can be traced back to the death of those he loved in his life, including his mother, step-mother, and wife. Poe conveys his fixation through his narrators in short stories, whether they kill based on fear, hate, or anxiety. By including death in all his works, he frightens his audience and shows them that death is unavoidable and constantly chases us throughout our lives.
The speaker believes that sleep and dreams are preferable to wakening life, depicting a man too depressed to even get out of bed. During the final stage of grief, acceptance, an individual begins accepting the reality that their loved one is actually gone and realizing that this new reality is permanent.