The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

In Sherman Alexie’s collection titled The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, many characters in this collection of stories intellectually benefit one another from telling their own stories. Native Americans can retain their history and cultural customs this way. For instance, Thomas Builds-the-Fire enjoys telling stories that are often surreal and have historical and natural contexts. His stories give his listeners observation of Native American history and how their experience had…

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…

The novel The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie showcases the Native American people of the Spokane reservation in Eastern Washington that have been plagued with poverty for generations. Alexie writes stories about the daily struggles of the people on the reservation and how they strive to make it out of the poverty by becoming modern warriors. Three common issues setback the Natives of the reservation and their culture influences this repetitive cycle of triumph and…

Bianca Hill Indigenous Identities HON 2973-007 Professor Amanda Minks 17 September 2015 Stereotyping Indians in Smoke Signals Sherman Alexie’s award winning book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is a collection of short stories in which he tells stories of Indians, mainly on the Spokane reservation. These stories are set in contemporary times, but the characters still struggle with the issues that have long affected Native peoples, like poverty, abandonment, and alcoholism. The…

The book, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, by Sherman Alexie is about a native tribe who go through a lot of difficult things but somehow manage to get through it all. They fight through it all and they preserve their culture. To them, family is the most important as well as their traditions. This book has a lot of interesting topics, such as, how spirituality plays an important role in the novel. They also explain how many of them have been destroyed by drinking and doing drugs at…

similar experiences or pasts, what makes them unique is how they let what happened to them shape their beliefs and view of the world. In his short stories “The Drug Called Tradition” and “Crazy Horse Dreams” within the novel The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight In Heaven, Alexie explores the idea of how a person's past influences them. Victor, the narrator in both short stories, is a Spokane Indian living on the Spokane reservation. Throughout the novel, readers are shown how Victor’s experiences…

of tribal culture they have left. Their culture, however, has been radically changed by the modern American culture. Sherman Alexie perfectly portrays this oppression and the plight of the Native American in Indian Killer and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Through the setting, plot structure, and characterization, Alexie uses both books to show the struggle that a modern Native American faces. “As a Native American… Sherman Alexie knows how difficult it is for someone to make…

The character Thomas Builds-the-Fire in the book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven tells many different stories of the hardships each Indian on the reservation deals with, and of the how the people on the reservation can handle these hardships. The stories he uses in this book are mostly fictional, but they tell stories in a different way than how your mind actually puts it. He adds a little more magic in his stories to make them sound believable. It is through Thomas’ stories that…

Alexie is currently working on Fire with Fire and The Magic and Tragic Year of My Broken Thumb, sequels to The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Anonymous 35). Alexie lives in Seattle, Washington with his wife Diane, who is of Hidatsa, Ho Chunk, and Pottawatomi descent, and two sons (Chadwyck-Healey 6; Cline…

Smoke Signals: The Importance of Story Telling Most of us are familiar with storytelling, being told stories throughout our lives. Story telling plays a huge role in Native American culture. Stories are told within households and communities to richen the relations and bonds between people. In Sherman Alexie’s film Smoke Signals, stories are used to show relationships between Suzy Song, Victor Builds-The-Fire, and Thomas Joseph which is illustrated in the stories shared between them. In the…