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

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

“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