Most of the short stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven deal with the issue of identity. Sherman Alexie grew up on an impoverished Indian reservation in Spokane, Washington, but also went to college and experienced corporate success. The challenges of being Indian in a "white-man's world" permeates much of his writing.
In one story in The Lone Ranger..., called "A Train Is an Order of Occurrence Designed to Lead to Some Result," a character named Samuel Builds-the-Fire is drinking after losing his job. Midway through a night of drinking, the narrator notes,
there is a moment when an Indian realizes he cannot turn back toward tradition and that he has no map to guide him toward the future.
This encapsulates the modern Indian dilemma. Living on the reservation is not tenable, but neither is going the traditional societal route of attending college and launching a...
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career. In the past, Indian men were warriors, hunters, leaders. Now they are searching for an identity in a society their ancestors didn't create.
In another story, "Junior Polatkin's Wild West Show," the main character is reading two books: a children's book and a western. "He pretended it was one big book," the narrator writes, "a strange book, a multiple-personality book." That would be an apt description of The Lone Ranger..., and of its author. One answer to Indians' existential dilemma, Alexie seems to be saying, is to not be one thing—be a proud Indian in one world, a diligent student or worker in another, a smooth high-school athlete in another.
Many of the inter-related stories in Sherman Alexie's collection involve characters searching for a sense of self-identity both within their indigenous culture and also within the larger Euro-American culture as well. Not only do these characters have the eternal quest for self-understanding the plagues all human beings but they also have competing forces pulling at their lives: the values and mores of their traditional culture and the values and mores of the contemporary world in which they exist.
Victor, Thomas, Junior, and Jimmy and Norma Many Horses are all characters struggle with their personal and tribal identity set against the struggles of the modern world, including racism, alcoholism, poverty, divorce, abuse, etc.