The Lone Ranger can be read either as a long poem, an experimental novel or a collection of short stories.
![the lone ranger and tonto fistfight in heaven the lone ranger and tonto fistfight in heaven](https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/The-Lone-Ranger-and-Tonto-Fistfight-in-Heaven_featured-1.jpg)
"You'll learn respect," she says, mocking him before the class by calling him "Indian, Indian, Indian." This part of the story ends with Victor saying, "Yes, I am. When he gets all the answers right, she crumples up the paper and makes him eat it. But she singles Victor out, giving him a test for junior-high students. In second grade, the missionary teacher gives the class a spelling test. The story "Indian Education" is structured like a diary documenting the first seven years of Victor, the protagonist, at school on the reservation and the next five years at the white farm-town high school. At intervals, Alexie so loses himself in his imagery that his prose unravels into a succession of modern sonnets with jarring, sardonic codas. Indian ball fast and loose." The author himself has parlayed his gift for writing poetry into fast, loose prose. In the title story, the narrator admires a white basketball player who "could play. Atlantic Monthly Press reportedly offered Alexie a six-figure contract for two more books: this one and a novel to follow. At 26, he has already published a collection of short stories and poetry, The Business of Fancydancing and two books of poetry. Three years ago, when the small literary journal Hanging Loose first published a few of Alexie's unsolicited poems and short stories, he stopped drinking. It's a ritual that may have saved his life. In real life, according to recent articles about him, Sherman Alexie begins his day writing at the kitchen table and rewards himself with a sweaty game on the Spokane YMCA court after lunch. Basketball is also a white man's invention that's been appropriated as the reservation game every Indian plays. In Alexie's fiction, basketball is a weapon and therapy for negotiating the straits between an impoverished Indian world and a suspicious, secret-coded white one. The Lone Ranger is a collage of dreams, journal entries, quotes from other native writers, archival letters, fictional Kafkaesque court transcripts, tribal newspaper reports, drug trips, and basketball games.
THE LONE RANGER AND TONTO FISTFIGHT IN HEAVEN SKIN
A young man with dark skin and long black hair is watched like a thief for walking into a 7-11 to buy a Creamsicle.
![the lone ranger and tonto fistfight in heaven the lone ranger and tonto fistfight in heaven](https://ecdn.teacherspayteachers.com/thumbitem/The-Lone-Ranger-and-Tonto-Fistfight-in-Heaven-Unit-Plan-5047916-1574430249/original-5047916-1.jpg)
Stare up at the surface, sunlight filtered through water like fingers, like a hand filled with the promise of love and oxygen."Īnd there are the constant humiliations Indians suffer off the "rez": A couple is pulled over for no reason by a cop who extorts money. "I remember my brother stretched out over the lawnmower, his mouth pressed tightly to the mouth of the gas tank. There are days when Victor's family is so hungry they fantasize eating "oranges, Pepsi-Cola, chocolate, deer jerky." Life in this American Soweto is so suffocating that drinking Sterno or sniffing rubber cement and gas fumes is a rite of passage as innocent as a child's first kiss.
![the lone ranger and tonto fistfight in heaven the lone ranger and tonto fistfight in heaven](https://im9.cz/iR/importprodukt-orig/e28/e288b1e4aaab2ff25a2c133e5a7bca88--mmf400x400.jpg)
Victor's sisters save a few quarters to buy food coloring to dye the potatoes red, green and blue, helping them imagine that the starchy whiteness is anything else. Both grew up on the reservation for the Spokane/Coeur d'Alene tribe, a government ghetto where dogs won't eat the "commodity" (government-issue) beef and cheese, but people do. One of them, Victor, is at least part Sherman Alexie. Maybe from all that thumping, the narrators of most of the 22 stories in The Lone Ranger are insomniacs. Keeping time like the staccato thumping of a nail stuck in a tire are drumbeats, blaring televisions, dancing, fighting, nightmares, visions and the small explosions of beer bottles thrown from a car driving in no particular direction. The world, in this case, is an American Indian reservation. READING Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is like leaning out the side window of a speeding car, watching the world slip in and out of focus faster than you can sort the future from the present from the past.