Comparing The Lone Ranger And Tonto Fistfight In Heaven

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The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie is about two boys, Thomas and Victor, who live on a reservation. Both of Thomas’s parents died when he was a baby in a house party. Thomas got thrown out of a window and Victor's dad caught him and saved his life. When Thomas and Victor were friends when they were young, but grew apart as they grew up. When Victor was young his dad left him and his mom and moved to Arizona. Victor never saw him again. Although Victor and Thomas grew up under similar circumstances, the way they handle trauma and express their emotions is very different.
Victor doesn't talk at all, he suppresses his emotions until he explodes on an unsuspecting bystander. He tends to blame other people and not acknowledge
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He likes to talk about the person he misses and celebrate their life. He tells stories about all of their accomplishments and all the great things they had done. And if he runs out of stories, he stretches the truth for the sake of a good story. In this case he tells stories about Victor's dad. How Victor's dad took him to Denny’s, and how he was a good guy. That's what angered Victor the most, that Thomas was portraying his dad as a good guy when Victor did not see him as that. “In that photograph, Arnold is wearing’ bell-bottoms and a flowered shirt, His hair in braids with red peace symbols splashed across his face like war paint. He holds a rifle above his head, captured in that moment.” (Smoke Signals) In this story Thomas paints Victor’s dad to be a beautiful site, someone fighting for peace. He paints him this way because this is how Thomas expresses emotions, he talks about the person. Victor does the opposite. Thomas wants a good image of that person after their death, so that they will be remembered and celebrated. He gets his storytelling from his grandmother, as you can see in the movie that they are very similar. Thomas always wants to talk about what happened even when people don’t want to …show more content…
Even random people, who have no idea what he's going through. They don’t know what trauma he has experienced recently so they have no frame of reference on why he is suddenly being rude. Victor has no right to do this because it’s not the peoples fault Victor's dad left, and lashing out at them won’t make him come back. Lashing out at them won’t make him feel better and it certainly won’t solve anything. “ ‘Then you really weren't on the team, were you? I mean, it didn’t really matter if there was a boycott or not. You were staying’ home anyways. You ain’t got nothin’to complain about, so why don’t you just be quiet?’ ‘What’d you do that for ? She was nice.’ ‘Nice, my ass. She was a liar.’” (Smoke Signals) Victor lashes out at this poor gymnast on the bus for absolutely no reason. All she was doing was talking to Thomas about her gymnastics career, and then Victor butts in. At the end of this quote he mentions that she was a liar. That seems to be what Victor attacks when he explodes on someone. He doesn’t like it when Thomas tells his stories because he doesn’t think they are true. The lady on the bus was talking about her career and Victor didn’t believe everything she was saying so he lashed out. Of course that's not the only reason he lashed out, but the point is that Victor expresses his emotions but not talking about them and pushing them down until he

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