Sherman Alexie's Flight Patterns

The experience of a minority in America is fundamentally different than that of a white American. In Sherman Alexie’s Flight Patterns, the reader has an opportunity to delve into the mind of not one, but two completely different sets of minorities and their viewpoints. Using comedy, Alexie touches on the differences between William and Fekadu, their trials and tribulations of the past and present, and most importantly the things they have in common. Unfortunately, the cliché story of an African, African American, American Indian, Asian American or any other minority is bleak, monotonously serious, and lacking of any sense of joy at all. Additionally, they almost always tend to lack the normalness that most stories have sprinkles of. Alexie …show more content…
Fekadu’s stories of murder and militia, defection, and indecipherable juggles of bravery and cowardice poke at the existential fears that every good man has. The reader is left to wonder about Fekadu and his mysterious escapades: whether or not he actually “dropped bombs on his own people”, if he really managed to escape a war zone and flee to France, and even if his family back home was only part of an odd story he told to all his customers. William himself even wonders if the truthfulness of Fekadu’s stories matters, and quickly learns that it does not. Fekadu’s role is to symbolize the “what if’s” and the situations that can realistically happen to people around the world. Not only does Fekadu serve as an example of a war deserter- an extremely misunderstood group in its own right- he serves as an example of a man who has walked through hell and can still share a laugh with a passenger. His duality of joy found within struggle is a template for what the most tested people go through every day, and to a lesser extent a representation of the mental extremes that outsiders face in society. Most importantly, however, Fekadu’s loss of family- his loss of what was most precious to him connects the reader, regardless of background or experiences, to the basic human nature that is the fear of loss of loved