Americans have had a love affair with cowboys and Indians since the early 1930s when The Lone Ranger first appeared on the WXYZ radio station. The Lone Ranger followed a clean cut, well-spoken hero who came in the form of a masked cowboy referred to as the ‘Lone Ranger’ and his trusty companion, an Indian named Tonto (“The Lone Ranger Debuts on Detroit Radio"). However, The Lone Ranger proved far from an accurate depiction of the “Old West” and even less so the relationship between Native Americans
of the time, unless you live or grew up on an Indian reservation, you would not be able to get a glimpse at that life. However, Sherman Alexie gave the public an opportunity to see what life was like for those from reservations in his book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Taking place from the 1960-1980’s, the book allowed readers to understand many of the struggles that Native Americans went through. The book, made up of short stories, also puts the audience on the same level as the
In the stories of Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” and Sherman Alexie’s “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven there is an external conflict of man vs. man. A conflict is the struggle between opposing forces in a story or a play, according to Prof. Clay. The conflict can either be internal or external, but in this case it is external because both characters struggle with a man vs. man conflict. Both stories also share a motif of a love/hate relationship. A motif is an idea or symbol that
In “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven”, Sherman Alexie presents a short story collection that centers on the Indian reservation. As Coulombe (94) depicts, most of Alexie's short stories in the collection frequently relate to scenes in the other stories, and this makes the collection seem like a novel. In a bid to analyze the works of the author the paper is going to focus on one of the stories in the collection, which is “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven”. The story has
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is a book written by Sherman Alexie a Native American fiction and poetry writer, who wrote a series of short stories about a man named Victor and his dreams and flashbacks. Sherman Alexie first began writing poetry, and created a book of poems called The Business of Fancydancing before writing his short stories on the post-modernism Native Americans. During the period of time when Alexie was writing poems and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
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
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
In this letter, I aim to convince you that The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is an essential book for high school students to read. As you may know, this book is often debated to be suitable or unsuitable for usage in the classroom due to its common usage of profanity, and lack of complex words. However, the writer’s skillful depictions of relationships between people throughout the book is a great source of information for young writers on how to depict relationships in realistic terms
Alexie Sherman is a Native American novelist born on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington. In his short story, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Alexie Sherman uses a character born in the same Reservation in Washington. This makes the author an authoritive figure and gives him more credibility for the arguments he makes in this short story. The title is allegorical, symbolizing white and Native Americans and their identities. The main argument that the author makes
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight In Heaven Defining exactly what shapes ethnic identity in the United States is the hardest question I can imagine being asked. As a child born in the United States, I find this question so difficult because I have been exposed to a large variety of cultures within the small boundaries of my own family. This makes it very difficult to determine one, or even a few characteristics that define ethnic identity. In the case of many of these novels, the task of
Sherman Alexie’s book, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, is a captivating compilation of short stories. Alexie writes about his life growing up on an Indian Reservation in Washington and his “part time” life as an Indian when he leaves the reservation as an adult. Alexie writes his stories from all different perspectives but closely sticks with a character named Victor to tell most of his stories. Victor is a representation of Alexie. Throughout the story Alexie addresses stereotypes
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, written by Sherman Alexie, talked about many of the serious problems facing modern American Indians include alcoholism, poverty, racism, limited access to education, and geographical isolation. Some of those problems still exist today when I read the news. In the story ‘Because My Father Always Said He Was The Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play “the Star-spangled Banner” At Woodstock’, Victor's father during the Vietnam war beat up a national guard
Native American Identity in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven Native Americans experienced five hundred years of violent subjugation under European imperialism, and as a result, many Native American reservations have since struggled to maintain communal composure and identity. Five hundred years of cultural trauma and oppression has ravaged many Native American reservations into sites of cultural paralysis, where a moment of hope is inevitably followed by failure and drinking in a
attention when speaking and it is a major tool when trying to engage a reader in a piece of writing. In a series of short stories composed by Sherman Alexie, Humor is a primary tool used in a majority of his pieces. According to Coulombe, In The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Sherman Alexie produces humor through his characters in order to allow them to “display strengths and hide weaknesses, to expose prejudice and avoid realities, and to create bonds and construct barricades” (Coulombe
Distinct manifestations of narrow-mindedness give rise to conflict in Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” and in Sherman Alexie’s “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.” In the former, conflict arises because the narrator is blinded by his own limited understanding of the world. He struggles to reconcile his ill-informed assumptions with the reality that he finds himself experiencing, but ultimately finds hope and resolution. In the latter, constraints imposed by racial stereotypes leave the narrator
Analysis of Sherman Alexie's 'The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven' and 'Smoke Signals' Sherman Alexie based on some short stories included in his book, 'The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,' wrote the screenplay for the movie 'Smoke Signals.' Both the movie and the book portray problems that Indians had to deal with, and how they dealt with it. The book is far more complex than the movie, showing a wider variation of characters facing different situations. In the movie
Heritage as an Idea of Oneself in Bless Me Ultima and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven Traveling through humanity is a never-ending story. Traveling through ethnicity is an ever changing journey. Is race or culture a matter of color? Is it a way of life; or a decision an individual makes? Is it an idea one has of themselves? In the novels, Bless Me Ultima (Anaya 1972) and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (Alexie 1993), two different minority characters, Tony and
“. . . every little war, every little hurricane. I’ll take my Indian thumb and my white fingers on my strong right hand and I’ll take my white thumb and my Indian fingers on my clumsy left hand and I’ll make fists, furious.” In The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven, written in 1993 by Sherman Alexie, he describes the present-day Native American experience through a series of short stories. Throughout the stories Alexie describes Native Americans in a very sad way. Many of the characters
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
like is glorified to be. Sherman Alexie uses his literary talent to expose the truth inside the reservation. In particular, in his short stories, “The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation No Longer Flashes Red,” “Every Little Hurricane,” and “Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,” Alexie reveals the ever continuous cycle trend of alcoholism, poverty, and racial injustice from one generation to the next. As the trend continues, the earlier it seems that the Native American youth are falling