Alcoholism is a vicious state which slowly kills the person it holds in its grip. Therefore, this drawing was used as a mode of expression to show the interplay between life, death, and alcohol. The head that overlooks what happens below is a culmination of many ideas that Reservation Blues has brought to light about alcoholism. The state of the head being half alive and half dead is an allusion to checkers referring to drunks as “brown-skinned zombies” (Alexie 99). The state of being controlled by alcohol is essentially simply existing but not living, because they no longer have control over their lives for the alcohol has stripped the little choices they had away from them. An example of this is Samuel Builds-the-Fire who Thomas describes
