Sherman Alexie
Essays

¶ … Sherman Alexie's short story "What You Pawn I Will Redeem," a central symbol is Jackson's grandmother's regalia, which he sees in the window of a pawn shop he has never noticed before.

The Native American tradition can be seen as an evolving cultural tradition that encompasses countless expressions of creativity, from many varied cultures and expressions of culture.

"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…

19th century poet Emily Dickinson is famous for her writing about the sometimes odd quality of being human, or rather the unnatural social norms that humanity has constructed. Dickinson claims that "[m]uch Sense -- the…

This paper analyzes the theme of "home" in Robert Frost's "Death of the Hired Hand," Langston Hughes' "Ballad of the Landlord," and Sherman Alexie's "What You Pawn I Will Redeem." Home carries a certain connotation in each story that links it to the notion of fraternal charity. In other words, home is more than just a "place"--it is a state of being.

This paper discusses three stories from Sherman Alexie's book, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven: "Every Little Hurricane," "What It Means To Say Phoenix, Arizona," and "The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire." The focus is on the writing style of these stories, specifically, on the rhetorical use of repetition. Through use of repetition, Alexie manages to create a hypnotic story-telling mode that draws readers into the world of the Spokane Indian Reservation in which the stories are set. The repetition occurs with the words themselves, as well as through the use of the stories that are told – or at times not told – but that retain their power in the lives of the characters.

Fighting the self in Sherman Alexie's "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven"

From Homer's Iliad to a modern day short story, the theme of place, background, and roots of the author plays a predominant role in the way the story is written, its intended audience, and the manner in which the…

Sincerity, Sarcasm, and Distance: Commonalities in Lorrie Moore's "How to Become a Writer" and Sherman Alexie's Flight

This essay explores the relationship between Native American identity and the blues in Sherman Alexie's novel Reservation Blues. The blues provide a shared language for the expression of Native and African American experiences, and the novel explores how this shared language can lead to a confrontation with the past. By charting how the blues influence the characters and spaces of the novel, one is able to see how the relationships between Native, African, and white Americans are more complex and cross-cultural than one might previously expect.