'Tonto’s Dysfunctional Family Tree Essay\r'

'America is a multi heathen body politic. This fact is undeniable. We ar a mishmash of people from every split of the globe, each with a unique story to tell. whizz of the struggles of being much(prenominal) a diverse nation is that different ethnic groups often fail to take care matchless a nonher. I believe that cross-cultural makeup is a exponentful tool that dispels ignorance and fosters greater multicultural understanding. Writing has the power to bring people together. thither are many giving cross-cultural writers in the history of American literature. Each of them has added to a proscribedgrowth genre that explores what it’s like to move to this state in pursuit of the ever-elusive â€Å"American Dream.” Sherman Alexie is one such writer. However, his theme is not one of searching for the â€Å"American Dream.” His theme addresses what happens when the â€Å"American Dream” lands on you. Sherman Alexie is inborn American, and his st ories expose one of America’s raunchy piddling secrets. In the paragraphs that follow, I will revue Alexie’s life, the genre and style in which he writes, and the overall themes of his work. I will analyze the bypass story, â€Å"every Little Hurricane”, taken from the anthology, The Lone commando and Tonto contend in paradise. Sherman Alexie was born on October 7, 1966 in WellPoint, upper-case letter. He belongs to the Spokane Tribe of American Indians called the Salish Group.\r\nAt the sequence of his birth he had hydrocephalus, a disease in which the patient has an excess of cerebrospinal fluid. The only woof was to get an operation that he nigh apparent would not give-up the ghost. Yet despite these dire predictions, he survived an invasive surgery at the tender eon of six months. He didn’t just survive; he thrived. Despite chronic seizures related to his condition, Sherman continues to power through life with extreme determination. He intentional to read at the age of three and from whence on nothing could hold him back. As a teen attending a reservation inform Sherman was shocked to dis acmeed his mother’s look up inscribed in one of his textbooks. The realization that the teach’s books were decades old led to his determination to move over the poverty-stricken reservation and get a utter(a) education elsewhere. He clear a discolouration in one of the top high schools in Reardon, Washington, where he was a star student and athlete. He proceeded to the University of Gonzaga, where his conceive of was to become a physician. After fainting from beat back in his anatomy class, he had to abandon this dream. It was during this benighted time period that he began abusing alcohol. He accordingly changed his major, a decision that was based on his fill turn up for poetry and aptitude for opus.\r\nThis change of direction brought him to Washington State University where he take off drinking and earned a B.A. in American Studies. Sherman Alexie began his professional charge in 1990 when his work was promulgated in respite Loose magazine. This initial success gave him the incentive to quit drinking at the age of 23, and he’s been sober ever since. His first collection of niggling stories, The Lone fire warden and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, was published in 1993, and that was just the beginning. In 1995 he launched his rush as a novelist with Reservation Blues, an expanded translation of the characters introduced in the previously mentioned collection. In 2007 he published a young adult novel, The Absolutely true up Diary of a Pgraphics-Time Indian. This novel is a reflection of his personal experience growing up on the Reservation. Alexie is the winner of numerous honors and awards including the 2001 create verbally/Malamud Award, the 1994 PEN/Hemingway Award, the 2007 National Book Award, and the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award (www.fallsapart.com). Alexie is a modern writer who is not bound by a single genre.\r\nHe has written poetry, novels, screenplays, and well-nigh notably pitiful stories. As the dominant inseparable American short story writer of today, he creates unique imagery through recurrent memories, visions and dream sequences. He utilizes diary entries, faux newspaper articles, and quadruplicate storytellers to tell stories within stories. One ex adeninele of this is seen in â€Å"Trial of Thomas Build-theâ€Fire”, where Thomas is personified as a number of historical figures. Alexie also uses cultural figures like Crazy Horse, Jesus Christ, Jimi Hendrix, and the Lone Ranger, to express the complexities of his humble characters. According to Leslie Ullman â€Å"He weaves a interrogatively soft-blended tapestry of humor, humility, pride and metaphysical provocation out of hard realities… the tin-shack lives, the alcohol dreams, the bad luck and dupery disasters, and the self- caustic courage of his char acters.” (Ruby, M. 2011). I believe Ullman’s comment is right on point. All of the stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven challenge the reader intellectually, emotionally and spiritually.\r\nAlexie seems to capture a two-fold purpose for telling his stories. Firstly, he yearns for all inborn Americans to keep their memories and heritage alive through the art of storytelling. Secondly, he communicates how modern native Americans endure the plunder of mainstream culture on their heritage, imagination and spirit. While his writing is modern, traditional or historical elements like powwows, conjuration dancing, intoxication and poverty, are interwoven throughout. His writing juxtaposes glumness with humor, brutality with kindness, and spirituality with materialism. He depicts numerous prominent characters in this collection, rather than just one or two dominant characters. The compilation contains twenty-two short stories that are loosely interconnec ted. In the first story, â€Å"Every Little Hurricane”, Alexie introduces themes that play out through the emit of the book, such as poverty, despair, death, alcoholism, humiliation, and the hope of transformation. In this story Alexie explains the choice amongst remembering the pain of the past, and creating a false reality to avoid that pain. Alexie uses the character headmaster, who is nightclub years old, to explain this struggle. The story is told from Victor’s perspective during a New Year’s Eve party at his parents’ home.\r\nDisturbed by the drinking and extreme violence, Victor reposes himself by imagining that a hurricane has caused the destruction, rather than his own tribe. The hurricane is a equal metaphor because it hits on both the emotional excitement and social chaos prevalent in Victor’s dysfunctional family. Victor is faced with the decision to either remember what really happened, or allow for by instead imagining that a hurricane caused the devastation. Ultimately, he chooses to seize the reality of his disturbing childhood. However, even though he chooses to live in the truth, he resorts to finding comfort in the only way he can, which is between the two unconscious bodies of his wino parents.\r\nAlexie points out that the dysfunction in Victor’s family is the result of a long-standing attitude on the Reservation. Violence has become habitual, and thusly accepted. This point is made when Adolph and Arnold (Victor’s uncles) begin to fight, acquiring mired in â€Å"a misdemeanor that would confront one even if just aboutbody was to die. . . . [For] one Indian killing another did not create a special kind of storm.” (Alexie, p 3) Alexie implies that American Indians have internalized all of the violence that has been perpetrated against them since their first contact with Europeans, so that even murdering one of their own goes almost unnoticed.\r\nThe oppression that they h ave suffered has turned them into silent witnesses. According to Victor, â€Å"They were all witnesses and nothing more.” (Alexie, p 3) As the story continues, Alexie points out that alcoholism is the most serious puzzle lining Victor’s tribe. Victor’s most powerful memory is of his father crying over the absence of Christmas presents, while getting drunk to send the pain of the family’s abject poverty. His father infinitely opens and closes an empty wallet â€Å"as if the repetition itself could assure change. But it was always empty.” (Alexie, p 5) Alexie shows the pervasiveness of alcoholism with unbroken references to the smell and taste of sweat, smoke, whiskey and blood. These are ceaseless companions of Victor’s existence, so that he truly believes that â€Å"the alcohol seeping through [his parents] skin tycoon get him drunk, might help him sleep.” (Alexie, p 9) From day one Victor is forced to gain natural selection skills to handle extreme fear and poverty.\r\nWhen he sees â€Å"an old, [drunk] Indian man drowned in a mud wee-wee at the powwow” (Alexie, p 7) he understands that alcoholism is not his family’s problem alone. It is a problem of his entire culture. After completing The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven it is obvious to me that Sherman Alexie is as Bob Hershon so aptly put it, â€Å"one of the major lyric voices of our time.” (Alexie, p xiii) His writing pulls the cover off of America’s dirty little secret of what life is like growing up on the Reservation. Many critics have vilified him for perpetuating the stereotype of the drunk Indian.\r\nThis is not so. Alexie doesn’t write about the destructive effects of alcohol on Indians due to some literary stance or prejudiced perspective. solely put, he is truth telling. I have wracked my adept to come up with an overall theme for this instal of literature. Then it came to me in a flash. Wh y not use Alexie’s own words, â€Å"I kept trying to figure out the main topic, the life-sized theme, the overarching idea, the epicenter. And it is this: The sons in this book really love and loathe their fathers.” (Alexie, p xxii)\r\nWorks Cited\r\nAlexie, Sherman. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. New York, NY:Grove Press, 1993, 2005.\r\nFalls Apart, Offical Website, http://www.fallsapart.com, 2013 Johansen, Bruce E. Native Americans Today: A Biographical Dictionary. Santa Barbara, Calif: Greenwood Press, 2010. Ruby, Mary. Authors & Artists for Young Adults Vol. 85. Detroit, Mich: Gale / Cengage Learning, 2011.\r\n'