of Batman and Robin team, but one in which the Robin figure, Tonto, is a member of the race that has been decimated by the whites (of which the Lone Ranger is a part). Though the Lone Ranger never mistreats Tonto, the fact of Tonto's obvious subservience to him is, or can be, offensive to Indigenous Americans and presumably to anyone today with enlightened sensibilities. Alexie's fiction is a corrective to this rather demeaning portrayal. In a more realistic world, his title suggests, the Ranger and Tonto would be fighting with each other, rather than cooperating, especially cooperating in a manner where the man who has or should have the grievance is subordinate to the other man. A reversal of the dynamic between them might make more sense, Alexie seems to suggest.

In the story "Distances," Alexie does present such a reversal, in a futuristic setting where the whites have been marginalized and exiled and the American Indians are the victors. Far from presenting this as an ideal, however, Alexie depicts it as a dystopia in which the Native Americans themselves discriminate against each other. The message coming across is that any form of oppression and massacre leads to more of the same, in an endless cycle of violence.

On the surface, the title The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven may refer to the conflict and fights between Victor Joseph and his white girlfriend. Victor Joseph and his girlfriend leave the reservation for Seattle. Victor finds work, but he drinks too much. The girlfriend confronts Victor, making the situation worse. The situation brings conflict to their relationship, and Victor decides to go back to the reservation.

Although the title may simply describe the conflict between Victor and his girlfriend, on a deeper level, the title may also describe the racial conflict that the narrator is exposed to in Seattle. He profiles customers at his workplace in order to preempt any potential theft at the store. The same is done to him when he drives through a middle-class neighborhood at night. He is pulled over and questioned. The heightened racial awareness gives him nightmares about being punished for having relations with a white woman. The fear forces him to leave Seattle.

The title The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven demonstrates that, despite the amicable depiction of the famous white lawman and his Indian sidekick, relationships between the two races are not that way in real life at all.  Enotes explains,

"The Lone Ranger and Tonto are symbols for white and native-American identity, respectively.  Their names are taken from a popular radio and television show of the 1950s in which a white man, the Lone Ranger, teams up with an Indian, Tonto, to battle evil in the old West".

In this and many images from popular culture, the white man and the Indian are represented as living and working side by side in harmony, with the white man the leader and more individually capable of the two, the Indian his inferior.  In reality, the white man came to America as an imperialistic conqueror, taking over land the Indians had occupied first, and leaving them disenfranchised and oppressed.  The stories in the book focus on a group of varied native-American characters who, with a sense of steadfast endurance and ironic humor, show what it is like to live, mired in poverty and alcoholism, stripped of their identity and "larger social purpose", yet unable and unwilling to adopt the culture of the imperialistic majority.

Alexie's collection of stories portrays American Indian culture in such a way that it is simultaneously a response to the centuries-long marginalization of the indigenous people by the whites and, as well, a picture of the long-term effects upon Native Americans of what has amounted to cultural (and actual) genocide. The title alludes to the popular radio and television series The Lone Ranger of the 1940s and 1950s, in which the title character is accompanied by his faithful Indian companion Tonto. The last thing that would ever have occurred on the actual series is a fistfight between these two. Tonto's devotion to the Ranger is absolute, an unfortunate symbol of the Indian's subservient position with regard to the Anglo. Though the Ranger never mistreats Tonto, and every indication is that their companionship is genuine, the white man is clearly the leader if not the master. Looked at from the perspective of what actually transpired between whites and Native peoples over the centuries, the TV show is an uncomfortable portrayal of a dysfunctional dynamic, though sugar-coated to make it look normal and benign. So in his title Alexie is overturning this stereotyping and celebration of the white man's victory and dominance over the Indian by imagining a fight between them.

This is not to say that most of his stories portray open conflict between the two groups. Alexie's focus is primarily upon his own people in situations that are microcosms often of the overall tragedy of American Indian history. At least one story in the collection, however, is especially important to discuss in the context of your question about the title. "Distances" is a brief dystopian tale in which the white culture has been destroyed in a cataclysm, a fulfillment of Wovoka's prophecy. Wovoka, the late nineteenth-century leader also known as Jack Wilson, believed that the Ghost Dance was a means by which Native Americans could enact a rebirth of their people and would restore their former glory. In Alexie's story a Tribal Council decrees that any remnant of the culture of the whites must be destroyed. Indians themselves are divided into two groups known as the Skins and the Urbans; the latter, those who had lived in the cities, are thought to carry an illness and are discriminated against by the rural Skins. Altogether, however, the story is a post-apocalyptic tale of a world in which the whites' victory over and subjugation of the Indians have been reversed.

Yet the message of this bleak dystopia shows, if anything, that vengeance against the whites unremarkably fails to achieve a solution to the fate of the American Indian. The title of Alexie's collection of stories is a metaphor of the conflict being a continuing one, ambiguous in meaning like so much in history and in the human imaginings of the future. No one can say which of the two will win this fistfight, and the implication is that both are losers in the long run.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie is a collection of interconnected short stories with recurrent characters. In the title story, one of the main characters, Victor Joseph, describes his deep-seated frustration as a Native American when he goes to Seattle to live with a white girlfriend and then returns to the Spokane Indian Reservation. The entire collection deals with the Native American experience both on the reservation as they deal with relatives and friends and outside the reservation in their interactions with the white man's world.

The Lone Ranger was originally a radio show and later a popular television program. Its main title character was a masked white hero who rode around the Old West fighting outlaws. He was accompanied by a Native American companion named Tonto who was always faithful and obedient and spoke only a few words of a sort of pidgin English. Many people, including many Native Americans, feel that the character of Tonto is racist and derisive. In effect, the Lone Ranger is presented as the master and Tonto as the servant.

In using the title The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Sherman Alexie seeks to level out reader perceptions and give the two characters equality, at least in the afterlife. The idea is that though Tonto is subservient on Earth because he has no choice, in heaven he would assert himself and fight it out with the Lone Ranger, a symbol of white superiority. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Alexie once said that he hates the character of Tonto. Although as a child he would often imagine himself as the heroic Native Americans that he saw in films, he never wanted to be Tonto. He says at the end of the interview, though, that the reason he always hated Tonto is that Tonto reminded him of himself. In heaven, at least, imagines Alexie, Tonto will have the confidence to punch it out with the Lone Ranger.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is a collection of short stories and poems with many of the same characters. There is Victor Jospeh, who is usually narrating the story to us; Thomas Builds-the-Fire, who is a storyteller at heart who struggles to find a willing audience; Junior; and Crazy Horse. The story tells of a community on the Spokane Indian Reservation that is wrestling with small town drama, survival, and the effects of historical trauma.

The story that is most famous in the collection also happens to highlight the ways Alexie uses storytelling as a method of exploring genocide and survival. In the story, Victor is trying to travel to Phoenix, AZ to collect his father’s ashes. He does not have the funds to cover his cost, and Thomas Builds-the-Fire offers to pay for the cost of both of them to go. They take a Greyhound bus from the Spokane Indian Reservation all the way to the desert. Victor finds Thomas Builds-the-Fire to be annoying and tiresome. He is always standing around town telling outlandish stories to bored audiences. However, over the course of their travels the two become friends with a deeper understanding of one another. We come to find out that Thomas has close memories of Victor’s father and cared personally about their trip to retrieve his ashes. Victor begins to see Thomas as an integral part of the community. Thomas is a storyteller at heart. Though his stories seem frivolous and don’t always make sense we learn that there is purpose behind them. Storytelling is, in fact, a gift that Thomas possesses. Furthermore, it is through stories that Thomas and Victor come to understand and connect with one another. They both come from the same community and have similar struggles with family, alcoholism, and feelings of isolation. They come together and build community through the opportunity to reminisce and share tales. This story inspired the film Smoke Signals.

There are a number of minor themes that thread throughout the short stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Some of these themes include poverty, alcoholism, externalized and internalized racism, acceptance or rejection of culture, and isolation. While no one of these themes is the sole primary message of the collection, they combine to paint an overall picture of Native American life on the reservation in the 20th Century.

Sherman Alexie's primary goal, then, seems to be to illustrate the various hardships faced by the modern (20th Century) Native American. In doing so, he is giving the reader a lens to a segment of the American population that tends to be underserved and underexplored in American culture. By giving the reader characters to sympathize with and understand in each story, and having those characters deal with -- and sometimes succumb to -- the very real problems that many Native Americans on reservations struggle with on a daily basis, Alexie helps to connect disconnected contemporary Americans with a group of people they may not know much about.

The title of the series of short stories, which came to Shermie Alexie in a dream, is dreamlike itself at times.  Representing the Native-American experience, Alexie incorporates various facets of the two characters, Victor Joseph and Thomas-Builds-the Fire.  There is the element of surrealism in this story collection as flashbacks, dream sequences, diary entries, and long poetic passages are employed in the narratives.  But, such is the Native-American experience that did, indeed, involve dreams and symbolism and metaphoric language.

One of the pivotal stories is "This is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona." (This story was used for the movie Smoke Signals.)  In this story, Victor decides to retrieve the belongings and ashes of his father.  Thomas-Builds-a-Fire offers to accompany him, providing Victor with the money to make the trip.  Along the way, Victor learns much about himself and his own identity.