The Lone Ranger And Tonto Fistfight In Heaven Summary

In Sherman Alexie’s book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, characters living on the Spokane Indian Reservation struggle with poverty, alcoholism, and family issues. Alexie uses metaphor, imagery, and symbolism to convey that when the Native population of America was forced onto reservations, generations fell into cycles of uneventful, alcoholism-ridden lifestyles, disconnected from their ancestry.
On the Spokane Indian Reservation depicted in the book, nothing ever happens. In the story “The Only Traffic Light on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore”, two characters sit on a porch and watch a year pass. They realize that a traffic light has been out all year and nobody has bothered to fix it. As stated in the story, “What’s

the point of fixing it in a place where STOP signs are just suggestions?” (Alexie 52). The traffic light symbolizes the absence of change on the reservation.

Seasons come and go, basketball stars come and go, but people are still stuck in their same ruts. In “The Fun House”, a middle-aged Native woman realizes how little her husband and adult son value her, despite all that she does for them. She spends a day floating on her back in a creek, reflecting on her life and her relationship with her husband. Upon returning home, she puts on a dress she made a long time ago, that had been sitting in her home, unworn. The dress was so weighed down by beads that she had said of it before, “When a woman comes along who can carry the weight of this dress on her back, then we’ll have found the one who can save us all” (Alexie 76). By putting on the dress, she steps up to that challenge herself. After years of the same routines, “she knew things were beginning to change” (Alexie 82). “Indian Education”, a story that focuses mainly on the contrast between white and reservation school experiences, includes a short postscript that depicts a frequently recurring reservation

attitude. In it, the recurring character Victor says “Why should we organize a reservation high school reunion? My graduating class has a reunion every weekend at the Powwow Tavern” (Alexie 180). The kids who go through all their years of schooling on the reservation grew into adults who stayed on the reservation, right where they grew up. They never left, never changed, so there’s no point to an organized reunion.
In such a stagnant environment, many characters turn to alcoholism. In the very first story of the book, “Every Little Hurricane”, a young Victor lies between his “alcoholic and dreamless” parents (Alexie 10). Throughout the story, he uses the metaphor of a hurricane to describe the destructive house parties that take place on the reservation. Even as a child, he knows that reservation life is unstable, built around a culture of alcohol and coping, ready to fall apart at any given moment. In a story about Victor’s later childhood and teenage years, “Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock”, Victor says about his highly alcoholic father, “I was born a goofy reservation mixed drink, and [he] needed me just as much as he needed every other type of drink” (Alexie 27). Victor compares himself with alcohol to explain his relationship with his father— unhealthy, need-based, and strained, but still loving. In fact, just about every story in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven deals with alcohol in some way or another. Drunks are mentioned constantly, offhandedly, accompanied by all sorts of different sentiments. In “Amusements”, two young Native characters take advantage of an old Native drunk, passed out in the grass, by putting him on a rollercoaster. The narrator later regrets it, calling himself “an Indian who offers up another Indian like some kind of treaty” (Alexie 58).
A more central theme of “Amusements”, though, is the strained relationship the narrator feels with his ancestry.

“Crazy mirrors”, he says, “the kind that can never change the dark of your eyes and the folding shut of the good part of your past” (Alexie 58). He knows he’s targeted by white people because his appearance is Native, and he’s caught between embracing and loving his culture and resenting it for the place in today’s society it has forced him into. In “A Drug Called Tradition”, three recurring characters, young men or maybe teenagers at the time, take a hallucinogenic drug and have visions of each other in highly cultural contexts. Thomas, describing what his hallucination, says to Victor, “I can see you. God, you’re beautiful. You’ve got braids and you’re stealing a horse…and you’re riding by moonlight” (Alexie 14). The story also includes short snippets from the perspective of each boy’s ancestral counterpart, in the respective situations described to each other. These are written in graceful language, with none of the swearing or simple sentence structures of the main story. Upon taking the drug, the boys feel more connected with their pasts. They are able to embrace their culture fully in a way that doesn’t feel quite as real when they’re sober. “Crazy Horse Dreams”, a later story, also deals with this theme. In it, Victor and a young woman court each other at a powwow, bantering and exchanging stories. They end up going their separate ways at the end of the

story, because Victor realizes that he can never be what she’s looking for. In Alexie’s words, “she thought she could be saved...she thought he was Crazy Horse” (Alexie 41). Crazy Horse is used throughout the story to symbolize the “perfect Indian man”, brave and proud and able to, in the young woman’s mind, make her brave and proud as well. She’s so caught up in this special imaginary man, this man who would convince she was special too, that she convinces herself he could be Victor. But Victor, attempting realism, refuses to admit that either of them could ever be special. His worldview is grim, pessimistic, and he can hardly be blamed for it when his whole life has been accordingly difficult.
Victor’s life is followed throughout most of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, as is reservation lifestyle in general. Sherman Alexie paints a stark contrast between the Native and white worlds. Many of the characters in this book spend years in the same situation, doing the same old things, drinking and fighting and telling stories. Alexie writes about universal similarities between Native people— surviving aggression from white society, from other Natives, from loved ones, from themselves, and from the reservation culture they’ve been forced into. Where white culture has dominated the U.S. and monopolized nearly every corner of the country, Native culture is based around the constant struggle for survival.