Student Question
What relevance does Sherman Alexie’s “Family Portrait” in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven have in today’s society?
Quick answer:
Sherman Alexie’s “Family Portrait” in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven continues to be relevant today because many families live in poverty, media representations of the larger world shape people’s aspirations, and children and parents still find it difficult to communicate.
At numerous points in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, an unnamed narrator reflects on his challenging relationship he had with his father while growing up. While some of the difficulties arose from his father’s personality, the narrator realizes that a more fundamental problem was the family’s poverty and his father’s frustration at not being able to overcome it. In “Family Portrait,” he shows how their limited material possessions—which often were far from new—became symbolic of that frustration. At the same time, the objects that represented contact with the world beyond their home and community were especially important, because they offered a window to other ways of life and potential opportunities.
In the 2020s, modern technology that can connect people with limited resources to the world has become even more important. The story emphasizes the television—both the sets themselves and the broadcasts they received. Today, flatscreens, cellphones,...
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and tablets along with the internet connections to use them are crucial communication devices as well as status symbols, and Native American rural communities often have very limited connectivity.
The narrator describes his father’s efforts to teach him to drive and the ongoing difficulties that man and boy had in communicating. Today, such driving lessons may still be common occurrences for adolescents, even though few cars have stick shifts, which presented a huge challenge for the boy. The gaps in communications and emotional connection between the generations are emphasized by the father’s continuing reference to subjects not related to their lives, including television. These kinds of communication and generational gaps remain common today and are probably exacerbated by excessive screen time.
Sherman Alexie's stories deal with marginalized people, often from dysfunctional backgrounds, in contemporary society, and "Family Portrait" in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is no exception. The unnamed narrator describes a childhood in which almost all his family memories are of television, which drowned out any interaction between parents and children. Even when his father taught him to drive, their conversation was all about television, as his father gave a detailed description of the first television sets he saw.
"Family Portrait" is relevant in today's society because the story depicts some of the most common social problems in contemporary America. The family members are deracinated, having little connection to each other, the landscape around them, or the country in which they live. They become passive and helpless, entirely dependent on electronic media for entertainment and for escape from a life which has no excitement or enjoyment in it. The family is poor, and their lives are hard. They try to find whatever distractions they can, and one summer, the narrator remembers that he and his brother and sisters became addicted to sniffing gas from the lawnmower. However, television is the most potent drug of all, and it acts as a narcotic to numb the pain of a dull and directionless life.