Summary and Analysis: Indian Education, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Family Portrait and Witnesses, Secret and Not
New Characters
Unnamed clerk at a 7-11; he sells the narrator of “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” a Popsicle.
Jerry Vincent: a former friend of the narrator’s father and murder victim whose case remains open in “Witnesses, Secret and Not"
Summary
An unnamed character again narrates the action, which begins in adulthood
and ends in childhood, in “Indian Education,” “The Lone Ranger and Tonto
Fistfight in Heaven,” “Family Portrait,” and “Witnesses, Secret and Not.”
The collection's title story follows the narrator’s return from a sojourn in
the city back to Spokane; the action alternates between events in the present
and memories of the past, now a recurrent technique in the book. The narrator
walks through the streets of Spokane in search of a Popsicle on a hot summer
night. He enters a 7-11 store, where a suspicious clerk watches him
carefully.
The feeling of being watched reminds the narrator of his past experiences with racial profiling in Seattle, both inflicted by him while he was working in a convenience store, and on him while driving through white neighborhoods at night. The action resumes at the cash register, where the narrator manipulates the nervous employee; he changes his requests several times to see how the clerk will react. The interlude ends with laughter as the clerk catches onto the game and offers the Popsicle as a token of peace.
A scene from the narrator’s life in Seattle again interrupts the action. He remembers a fight with his white girlfriend. She accused him of stupidity and drunkenness, and he threw lamps at her in response, both common elements of their frequent fights. The moment that he decided to leave her stands out in his mind. He awoke from a nightmare. In the dream, they were lovers over a century ago. She was the adulterous wife of a white missionary; he was a treacherous Indian warrior. The punishment for the relationship, once discovered, was a massacre of the indigenous tribe that began with his death. The terror of the dream finally convinced him to leave.
As the narrator finishes eating the Popsicle, he remembers the events that immediately followed his departure from the city. His parents expected his return and welcomed him back into their home. After a short time just watching television and playing basketball with the Reservation kids, he finally found a job in Spokane, with an exchange program for high school students. He remembers the day that his ex-girlfriend called him at work; he told her of the changes in his life, his new sobriety and work. The call ended with a mutual apology for the past. Back in the present, the narrator returns home and tries to sleep. His insomnia, however, no longer disturbs him. He “know[s] how all . . . [his] dreams end anyway.”
Each of the remaining stories offer vignettes from the narrator’s childhood. In “Indian Education,” the narrator recounts his progress through the educational system. The story is broken into segments by grade level, from first through twelfth. The narrator assumes the identity of Junior Polatkin, a Reservation boy who wears glasses and suffers constant torment from his classmates. Even the teachers punish him for being too good at spelling or drawing inappropriate, but creative, pictures. He remembers the “sweet, almost innocent choices that Indian boys were forced to make,” like that between sniffing glue and playing basketball. As early as grade school, he chooses the latter. Junior high brings the experiences of kissing girls, being diagnosed with diabetes, and playing in basketball games. In his white high school off the Reservation,...
(This entire section contains 1858 words.)
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he notes the irony that he is “probably the only actual Indian ever to play for a team with . . . [this] mascot.” He graduates as valedictorian and compares his accomplishments to those of his Native American peers. On the Reservation, graduation brings parties for the bad students and fear for the good students.
In “Family Portrait,” the narrator remembers fragments from life in his childhood home: a television always turned up too loud, the hunger he shared with his brother and sisters, the departure of their father one night. These events become stories that each family member tells in a slightly different form. From his current adult perspective, the narrator understands the differences of opinion. Memories change from person to person and alter even more over time. Even a summer spent getting high on the fumes of lawnmower gas is remembered as a time of bright sunlight and hilarity. He has changed his memories to “construct[]. . . a past to justify what [h]e feel[s] now.”
The memories shift to the story of the narrator’s first experience of driving, which included trouble shifting, and his father’s first sight of a television, which pictured a repeating image of a woman sitting on a television. These images, in turn, provide the symbols for the final section. The television is the world and the woman symbolizes different family members; she becomes an emblem of “forgiveness,” the reason “we hold each other tight.” The children sitting below, watching, “open [their] mouths . . . in hunger, in anger, in laughter, in prayer.”
Time shifts again in the “Witnesses, Secret and Not,” with a jump of a few years to 1979. The narrator is thirteen and is concerned with his identity as both a “man” and “Indian.”
His father is called in for questioning about the murder of a friend, Jerry Vincent, years ago on the Reservation. The boy questions his father relentlessly about the murder during the drive to the police station. A near accident interrupts the conversation as the car skids on ice, turns in a complete circle, and continues in the same direction again. Father and son, stunned only momentarily, continue the conversation. The details of the murder are finally revealed; Jerry was shot behind a bar after drinking with his friends. This story has been told repeatedly to the police, but little progress has been made in finding or prosecuting the killer. Instead, it is merely a “story” that everyone knows and tells when they are asked to do so. The discussion turns briefly to death, what it might feel like to be dead or to kill someone.
At the police station, the narrator notices the difference between his father and the white people surrounding him; his father is like a stereotype of himself, with “braids . . . three miles long and black and shiny.” He grows impatient while waiting in the car and joins his father for the uneventful meeting about the murder. The pair leaves “feeling guilty,” although they have not committed or even been accused of a crime.
During the drive home, the boy imagines that situations like Jerry’s are so common on the Reservation that “all Indians can do is talk about the disappeared.” They arrive home safely and his father cries openly over dinner.
Analysis
These stories appear at the end of the book; each tale relies on an anonymous narrator and resembles the others in theme and content, especially a concern with self-identity for Native American men. In fact, the personal perspective offered in these stories has caused speculation among many critics that the narrator is Alexie himself. or one of the main characters from the other stories, such as Junior or Victor.
The title story, which begins with adulthood, focuses on events and motivations that led to a return home from Seattle, back to Spokane. The reasons for this return might be due to him taking on an unfulfilling job and being involved in an unhealthy relationship; however, the real reasons are linked to the racial identity of the narrator. He is more aware of race in this new environment in Seattle than he has ever been before. He profiles customers at work in order to prevent a possible robbery. He is pulled over and questioned while driving through a middle-class neighborhood at night. Finally, he has nightmares of brutal punishment for his involvement with a white woman. The nightmares finally convinces him to leave.
The return home seems to resolve his fears; his new life brings sobriety, a better job, and closure with his white girlfriend. However, this ending does not seem to resolve all of the questions and conflicts that opened the story. The problem of living in both cultures, white and Native American, still remains. The narrator has merely moved from one location to another; he has not yet found a way to merge or reconcile his experiences in Seattle and Spokane. It seems that two cultures and periods in his life remain locked in conflict; the differences between them are as distinct as those between the Lone Ranger and Tonto on television, as suggested in the title.
The remaining stories explore the process of forming a sense of self out of the experience of cultural conflict and change. The narrator turns to childhood, a time dedicated to the formation of adult identity, to explore this question.
Junior, the narrator of “Indian Education,” suggests that his early years only seemed to further separate him from his peers, family, and culture. He made choices in school, such as pursuing his love of spelling, that distinguished him from his classmates. These choices culminated in attendance at a mostly white high school, an environment that both developed his talents and distanced him from his community at the same time. As he graduates as a basketball player and academic star (he is the valedictorian of his class), Junior reflects not on his own success, but rather on the limited choices available to his peers “back home on the Reservation.”
The examination of the narrator’s memories yields a non-linear plot in “Family Portrait;” the story of the narrator’s life is fraught with inconsistencies in experience and opinion. Moreover, he realizes that even the memories of a single person change over time as his or her experiences accumulate and emotions shift. This story accordingly suggests that the past is not the whole truth, but rather an interpretation; history has been irrevocably altered to “justify” the present.
The only constant that seems to remain is a willingness to “witness” these facts despite their inherent unreliability. “Witnesses, Secret and Not,” the final story in the collection, explores this claim. The narrator recalls the day he learned of Jerry Vincent’s murder and assisted his father during a trip to provide testimony at the police station. Yet the murder is neither as exciting nor as straightforward as the boy had hoped. His father admits that he saw Jerry just before the murder and heard the story that spread about it later; however, his knowledge ends with these details. As father and son discuss the infamous murder, it becomes clear that the story, not the crime, is finally more important to the community. In this case, the aim of the story of Jerry Vincent is not to reveal the identity of Jerry's killer, but rather to bear witness to the frequency of such “disappearances” among Indians. A witness creates stories with meanings that are both personal and cultural, significant to the tribe as well as to the entire community.
