Flight Time Travel as Character

Flight Time Travel as Character Formation in Sherman Alexie's Flight "Do you really think I'd become some sort of asshole citizen if I wore a tie and shiny shoes?" This is one of the first things that the main character of Sherman Alexie's latest novel, Flight, says to the social worker in response to her continuing psychobabble and superficial show of interest in his life, and it gives a pretty good idea of his character right from the outset.

Zits, as this protagonist identifies himself to the reader, has much in common with other of Alexie's protagonists -- he is fatherless, an Indian (though Zits is not a "legal" Indian due to his father's abandonment, and throughout the novel he witnesses extraordinary levels of violence that have also formed a theme in much of Alexie's work.

Zits and Flight are unusual, however, for the role that time travelling and body-inhabiting play in shaping this character and this plot; as Zits contemplates his own moment of violence, he finds himself transported to various eras, events, and personalities associated with violence throughout America's history and undergoes a radical change in character and perspective due to these experiences. Zits' contemplation of violence and his feelings of isolation and hatred are understandable given his life history.

Denied by his father and thus never accepted into Indian communities, Zits was raised by his hard-drinking Irish mother until she died from cancer when he was only six. Since then, typical tales of foster care abuse, neglect, and attempts to control and define him have led Zits to view all of society and other humans as his natural adversaries. At the moment of the novel's start, Zits is a fifteen-year-old who considers his life to be over.

In an attempt to inflict as much pain as he can during his departure form the world, Zits has developed a plan to cause massive deaths on a scale similar to the heavily publicized school and workplace shootings of recent years.

By inhabiting the person of an FBI agent who deals death and violence to Indian activists, seeing through the eyes of a flight instructor whose student turned out to be a terrorist, and eventually inhabiting the present-day body of his own homeless and dying father, Zits learns the true effects of violence and what its existence indicates about human beings and their interactions with each other.

Simply put, Zits comes to learn that acts of violence are not isolated, and that they have complex and lasting repercussions that could never be negated, mitigated, or rendered just by further acts of violence. Seeing Through the Eyes of Others It is not so much the time travel that is essential in forming Zits' character as it is the different perspectives he takes on in each different time that challenges his preconceptions and ultimately leaves him more optimistic than he was at the start of the novel.

The very first of these transformations shows Zits how important fear is as an instigator of violence. As an FBI agent tasked with slaying radical Indian activists -- radical in the sense that they are demanding a true revolution and a reclamation of land that is theirs through ancestral right and through legal treaties signed by the United States government -- Zits sees that violence leads to more violence, but his learning is more visceral and complex than this pithy cliche allows for.

What he sees is that violence creates fear and a recognition of threat, and violence to control this threat is the first impulse for people to turn to. In a later transformation, Zits finds himself occupying the body and mind of a flight instructor flying in an airplane, and recalling the student of his that turned out to be a terrorist, and used the knowledge gained from the flight instructor to carry out an attack involving an airplane.

As Alexie himself recalls, this was truly the character -- or perhaps the concept, and the idea -- that truly germinated into the full novel. The author heard an interview with the flight instructor of one of the men responsible for the September 11th terrorist attacks, and the sense of personal betrayal that this real-life flight instructor felt was made palpable for Zits just as it was made perfectly clear and intriguing to Alexie (NPR 2007).

Zits learns that no act of violence is complete in and of itself, and that it does not only make large statements, but instead that some of its most important and lasting effects are deeply personal and often unpredictable. Violence is inherently a lack of control, and so one cannot control its effects nor limit them simply to the people that the violence directly affects. The last personality that Zits occupies is that of his own father.

He does not realize this immediately; Zits has never met his father, and all he knows when the transformation occurs is that he is in the modern day, is drunk, and is sick. A young couple that finds him vomiting blood tries to help him, "But I can't control my emotions. My fears," Zits reflects, and he -- or the body that he occupies -- runs away (p. 135).

It is his recognition of his own fear and his own inability to control himself that begins to make a final impression on Zits and lead him to the realization that he has been seeking a place to assign blame for his anger, and that he has viewed violence as a means of correcting the unfairness and imbalance in his life. Conclusion Zits begins his adventure in this book on the brink of committing a horrific act of violence.

After being transported back in time to the position of an FBI agent -- an assassin, really -- he begins to realize the fear that violence comes form, and the increased fear and violence that.