Alexie, Sherman | Jennifer Gillan (essay date March 1996)
Jennifer Gillan (essay date March 1996)
SOURCE: Gillan, Jennifer. “Reservation Home Movies: Sherman Alexie's Poetry.” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 68, no. 1 (March 1996): 91-110.
[In the following essay, Gillan traces the influences of popular video culture on the content and structure of Sherman's storytelling in poetry and prose.]
When David Bell, the protagonist in Don DeLillo's Americana, leaves New York, he heads north on a long journey into the “gut of America.”1 He arrives in a small Maine town resembling a sound stage and stays overnight in an old house, “the place where everyone's grandmother lives in television commercials.” He is told a story about a Sioux holy man, Black Knife, who prophesies that only a trip into what Bell earlier calls the swamp of our being would cure America and allow it to become, finally, “the America that fulfills all of...
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