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...
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In his book, Grassian looks at Alexie’s works from The Business of Fancydancing and Old Shirts and New Skins to Ten Little Indians and analyzes each work such that readers can understand what Alexie is trying to convey. In Chapter 1, Grassian gives some background on Alexie’s childhood, which helps readers understand how Alexie quickly learns the power of humor. An analysis of Alexis’s use of humor in “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor” is included in Chapter 3.
McFarland, Ron. "'Another Kind of Violence': Sherman Alexie's poems." The
American Indian Quarterly 21.2 (1997): 251+. General OneFile. Web. 27 July 2011.
In this essay, McFarland discusses Native American poetry and Sherman Alexie’s works. He provides an overview of Alexie’s writing in both his poems and short stories. A brief analysis of Alexie’s use of humor is also included.
This shows the aspect of humor because, he wants to show he can do the impossible and become a world renowned scientist for solving one of man- kinds many ailments. Such as skin ailment and /or paralysis among other aliments he thinks of. He also develops a life under the use and abuse of drugs, crystal meth. He identifies himself with drugs, falling to the drug addict status, which impacts his life on a different setting, further explaining that he felt down after his dealer in drugs fly’s out of the country.
As this poem characterizes the view of a native woman expressing feelings of passion relating to her culture, it also criticizes society, in particular Christianity, as the speaker is experiencing feelings of discontent with the outcome of residential schools. It does not directly criticize the faith, but through the use of a heavy native dialect and implications to the Christian faith it becomes simple to read the speakers emotions.
In the story “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor,” by Sherman Alexie, Jimmy uses humor to cope with tragedies in his life, such as his mother-in- law passing away, harassment by the police, and his wife Norma leaving him. Humor is something that is not only used when there is a tragedy event; it is also used in at joyful events for example, at a wedding giving the best man speech. Jimmy uses humor to fulfill the gap in his life that was created by the unfortunate event of him having a tumor. Jimmy is very optimist person, who looks at life as glass half full instead glass half empty by having humor in everything. Humor is something that comes naturally to some people not everyone has this ability; having humor in life can help a person deal with unfortunate events, if the humor is tasteful and used efficiently. Humor is a great asset in a person life; it helps a person to establish a bond with friends and family, also it’s a great tool to motivate a person to face their challenges and keep their head up in the hard times.
Sherman Alexie grew up in Wellpinit, Washington as a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene tribal member (Sherman Alexie). He began his personal battle with substance abuse in 1985 during his freshman year at Jesuit Gonzaga University. The success of his first published work in 1990 incentivized Alexie to overcome his alcohol abuse. “In his short-story and poetry collections, Alexie illuminates the despair, poverty, and alcoholism that often shape the lives of Native Americans living on reservations” (Sherman Alexie). When developing his characters, Alexie often gives them characteristics of substance abuse, poverty and criminal behaviors in an effort to evoke sadness with his readers. Alexie utilizes other art forms, such as film, music, cartoons, and the print media, to bombard mainstream distortion of Indian culture and to redefine Indianness. “Both the term Indian and the stereotypical image are created through histories of misrepresentation—one is a simulated word without a tribal real and the other an i...
This quote describes how Louise Halfe uses all four common elements of native literature in her writings. I have chosen to discuss two of the elements she frequently uses, Spirituality and Orality in relation to three of her poems: My Ledders, She Told Me and The Heat of my Grandmothers.
In Momaday's work, the reader is on a journey through myth, past and present, as the author draws on oral traditions of Native American storytelling to align-in-parallel a personal journey for understanding of himself, and perhaps the nature of man. Through an inventive technique, Rainy Mountain serves as a way to collect, preserve and disseminate the oral storytelling traditions of Native American storytellers. Momaday has attempted to bridge the oral traditions to written form by weaving three continual strands as a single long braid throughout the text.
Alexie’s contrasting style is used to help support his thesis that America is a contradiction. Sherman uses events and people to show the contradiction in our history. “How did we get from there to here? This country somehow gave life to Maria Tallchief and Ted Bundy, to Geronimo and Joe McCarthy… to the Declaration of Independence and Executive Order No. 1066…” and forces readers to understand the contradictory state of the union, and the entire world. The forced analysis put forth in “What Sacagawea Means to Me” pushes the readers of TIME to digest his complex thought, and to enrich themselves in a history different than the one found in their high school
In “Turkeys in the Kitchen,” an essay written by Dave Barry, humor is used as an aid to make a point about the usefulness of men after Women’s Liberation. “A Plague of Tics,” a personal narrative written by David Sedaris, uses a different kind of humor to explain the reasoning behind his behavior. Through these two essays and their author’s personal experiences, humor is presented as a device to captivate reader’s attention and declare the author’s intended meaning.
Maya Angelou was using humor to make the story a little more interesting and happy, while it was a very dark event. She uses this technique about four to five times during her short story. I do believe that by including humor, she
In conclusion, Sherman Alexie created a story to demonstrate the stereotypes people have created for Native Americans. The author is able to do this by creating characters that present both the negative and positive stereotypes that have been given to Native Americans. Alexie has a Native American background. By writing a short story that depicts the life of an Indian, the reader also gets a glimpse of the stereotypes encountered by Alexie. From this short story readers are able to learn the importance of having an identity while also seeing how stereotypes are used by many people. In the end of the story, both Victor and Thomas are able to have an understanding of each other as the can finally relate with each other through Victor's father.
Connie Fife is a Saskatchewan, Cree poet who writes using her unique perspective, telling of her personal experiences and upbringing. This perspective is revealed to her audience through the poems “This is not a Metaphor”, “I Have Become so Many Mountains”, and “She Who Remembers” all of which present a direct relationship to her traditional background and culture (Rosen-Garten, Goldrick-Jones 1010). To show the relationship of her experiences through her poetry, Fife uses the form of dramatic monologue, as well as modern language and literal writing to display themes about racism presenting her traditional viewpoint to her audience.
Growing up on an Indian Reservation is a tough thing to do. Everyone is poor, and almost every adult is always drunk and unhappy. Junior’s own father suffers from alcoholism. His father will sometimes forget about Junior and never shows up to give him a ride home. Junior is then forced to walk or hitchhike all the way back to the Reservation. His father also constantly spends all of their money on alcohol, even during the holidays, “...Dad did what he always does when we don’t have enough money. He took what little money we did have and ran away to get drunk” (Alexie 150). Junior’s unfortunate understanding of alcoholism makes him see the world as an unfair place. He knows that he never wants to be like his father when he grows up. Alcohol also causes a lot of deaths in Junior’s life. His sister died in a terrible fire because she was too drunk to escape her burning RV. Junior is let out of school early because of his sister’s death. He has to wait for his father to come get him, and he laughs and he cannot stop laughing at the thought of his dad also dying on his way to pick Junior up, “...it’s not too comforting to learn that your sister was TOO FREAKING DRUNK to feel any pain when she BURNED TO DEATH! And for some reason, that thought made me laugh even harder, (Alexie 205). When he finally finds out about how his sister dies, he cannot help but laugh even more. Every Indian dies because of alcohol, and Junior finds it funny
Much of today’s humor stems from making fun of others or the problems of first world people. Back in the 19th century, however, humor came from different sources. For instance, Mark Twain wrote many stories that were outlandish and implausible. One of his tall tales is “The Celebrated Frog of Calaveras County.” In it readers can see that Twain follows a pattern to create humor. A specific passage in the story represents the very key to what makes Twain’s stories so funny. Twain’s implausibility shows that he doesn’t take life too seriously.
The underlying theme of Brown’s writing is the overall inappropriate and poor treatment of Native Americans during the late 1800’s, as the US government began to attempt to take over all of the land that the Native Americans were living on. The events of the book are a good representation of the historical background of the time in which the book is written. Dee Brown essentially is writing a chronology depicting the existence of Native Americans in early America. The book opens with a discussion of the early years of Native American inhabitance, and their relationship with settlers up through the mid-1800s. Early on, the relationship was peaceful, and Brown discusses the time period when the Pilgrims began to arrive, and how the Native Americans helped those Pilgrims survive on the new land and especially how to survive the winter. However, as the late 1600’s and early 1700’s came, settlers – mostly white from Europe, began to encroa...
Several literary devices are implemented in the novel to convey the author’s experiences and feelings, thus contributing to the overall appeal of the writing. In his younger years