According to Sherman Alexie in an interview with CINEASTE, the five major influences on his writing are “my father, for his nontraditional Indian stories, my grandmother for her traditional Indian stories, Stephen King, John Steinbeck, and The Brady Bunch.” It is no wonder then that Alexie’s work, in particular the short stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, has been described by American Indian Quarterly as resembling a “casebook of postmodernist theory” that revels in such things as irony, parody of traditions, and the mingling of popular and native cultures. The result is a body of work that allows Alexie to challenge and subvert the stereotypes of Native Americans seen in the mass media (the warrior, the shaman, the drunk) and explore what it means to be a contemporary Native American.

In commenting on Native American poets and writers, writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko describe how Native American artists often create their strongest work when they write from a position of social responsibility. In Alexie’s case, his work is often designed to effect change by exposing other Indians and whites to the harsh realities of reservation life. In Alexie’s early work—work influenced by his own alcoholism and father’s abandonment (as seen in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven)—he uses the Spokane Indian community as a backdrop for his characters, who often suffer from poverty, despair, and substance abuse. Yet it is his use of dark humor and irony that enables these characters to survive both their own depressions and self-loathing and the attitude and activities of the often ignorant and apathetic white society. Alexie writes in his short story “Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock”:On a reservation, Indian men who abandon their children are treated worse than white fathers who do the same thing. It’s because white men have been doing that forever and Indian men have just learned how. That’s how assimilation works.

With sobriety, Alexie claims that from The Business of Fancydancing in 1992 to Smoke Signals in 1998, his vision of Indian society has brightened and his writing has moved from focusing on the effects to the causes of substance abuse and other self-destructive behaviors. In CINEASTE, Alexie describes his growth as a writer in this way:As I’ve been in recovery over the years and stayed sober, you’ll see the work gradually freeing itself of alcoholism and going much deeper, exploring the emotional, sociological, and psychological reasons for any kind of addictions or dysfunctions within the [Indian] community. It’s more of a whole journey, you get there and you get back.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

Alexie’s first collection of (only) short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, received much critical acclaim. Many of the Native American characters that he introduced in his earlier poetry—like the storyteller Thomas Builds-The-Fire and his friend Victor Joseph—appear here as vehicles through which Alexie illustrates how Indians survive both the hardships they face on reservations and the gulfs between similar and dissimilar cultures, time periods, and men and women.

In a number of the twenty-two often autobiographical stories in this collection, Alexie infuses irony into tales that illustrate the destructive effects ofalcohol on both children and adults on reservations. For example, in “The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Any More” he weaves the tradition of storytelling with the contemporary issue of how cultures create their own heroes. In this story, the narrator and his friend...