Student Question
What does the narrator mean when he says there's no place he "is supposed to be" in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven?
Quick answer:
The policeman asks Victor where he’s supposed to be. Victor thinks, “I knew there were plenty of places I wanted to be, but none where I was supposed to be.” The quote underscores how Victor is “Other’d." He’s separate and different. He doesn’t fit the profile of someone who’s supposed to be in the United States. What Victor wants, you could claim, is to find a place where he’s not considered a criminal.
In Sherman Alexie’s short story/chapter “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,” Victor recounts a conversation that he had with a police officer when he was working the graveyard-shift at a 7-11 in Seattle.
During this time, Victor had a girlfriend—a White woman—and they fought constantly. To get away from her, Victor would drive around. One of his escapist drives leads him to a “nice residential neighborhood.” Victor’s presence in this affluent part of town gets the attention of the police.
The officer asks him what he’s doing.
Victor tells him that he’s lost.
The officer asks him where he’s supposed to be.
As your question already acknowledges, Victor thinks to himself: “I knew there were plenty of places I wanted to be, but none where I was supposed to be.”
You could focus on the difference between “supposed” and “wanted.” The “supposed” implies a kind of confinement. Someone or something is trying to restrict him to a place.
You could claim that many of the stories confront the idea of place and where an indigenous person does fit in and doesn’t fit in. You could say Victor’s place is “supposed” to be at the Spokane Reservation. That’s the land that the United States set aside for Victor and his people. Yet that place isn’t so positive for Victor.
Then again, Victor’s travels beyond the reservation aren’t so positive either. The carnival wasn’t so uplifting and living with his girlfriend in Seattle hasn’t been so amazing.
Back to the interaction with the officer. The policeman tells Victor, “You’re making people nervous. You don’t fit the profile of the neighborhood.”
Victor thinks: “I didn’t really fit the profile of the country.”
Perhaps that’s what Victor wanted. Maybe he wanted to be in a place where he does fit the profile of the country. He wanted to be in a place where he’s not thought of as suspicious or a threat.
Explain the narrator's feeling of having no place in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.
The narrator of the story is a Native American man who has moved away from the reservation where he grew up. Since doing so, he has experienced displacement and alienation. So far, he has not found a place where he “was supposed to be,” or feels that he truly belongs. The quoted phrase is the last part of a sentence in which he first says, “there were plenty of places I wanted to be.” His move to the city seemed like the correct decision, but he does not feel at home there. Although he had recognized many limitations in reservation life, he has come to realize that the process of finding the right physical environment goes hand in hand with his quest for personal identity.
The process of soul searching had included his embracing the idea that leaving the reservation was necessary both for him and for the young people of his generation. As a “new kind of warrior,” he represented renewed hope for Native American people. He believed that he had psychologically and emotionally accepted the responsibility to become a symbolic eagle who would “rise above the rest of the reservation.” Instead, in the city without his family and Indian community, and in a relationship with a white woman, he felt lonely rather than courageous. He decides to move back to the reservation.
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