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This story is a meta-narrative in which Alexie seems, through Junior’s mother, to be pointing out the heaviness of the themes that run throughout his own stories. She implores her son to highlight the positive aspects of the Native American experience, and to ensure that “people know” the full spectrum of the lives Native people lead.
This further reinforces the hypothesis that Victor narrates “A Good Story”. After all, Alexie acknowledges in the introduction to the 2003 edition that Victor is an autobiographical character. In this way, Alexie implicates himself when the narrator's mother chastises him for telling only negative stories.
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Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play The Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock is an ode to Victors father, who was, according to Victor, the perfect hippie during the sixties, since all the hippies were trying to be Indians. Victor recollects nights when his father would come home drunk, and could only be comf...
In The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesnt Flash Red Anymore, Victor and his friend Adrian are drinking Pepsis on Victors porch when they see a group of Indian boys walking by. They recognize one of them as Julius Windmaker, the best basketball player on the reservation. They muse about his potential and whether or not hell make it off th...
In The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire, Thomas stands trial after offending a member of the Tribal Council. In a Kafkaesque (dark, dystopian, and disorienting) proceeding, Thomas recounts several of his stories (the majority of which seem to be dreams or visions rather than fact) and ultimately indicts himself on several trumped-up charges. He is s...
In A Good Story, Alexie creates a meta-narrative in which the narrator, Junior, tells his mother, who is busy quilting, a story about a man named Uncle Mosespresumably Moses MorningDovetelling a story to a local boy named Arnold.
Imagining the Reservation is an ode to imagination, and the role it plays in Native American life. Imagination is, the narrator notes, the only weapon on the reservation. The story speculates on what life might be like for Indians if Crazy Horse invented the atom bomb in 1876 and detonated it over Washington, D.C.; if Columbus landed in 1492 and so...
The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor is narrated by James Many Horses, now an adult known on the reservation for his incessant joking. He angers his wife Norma by joking about dying while confessing to her that he has received a terminal cancer diagnosis. His wife leaves him, and, during his ongoing cancer treatments, he reflects fondly on the...
Indian Education, narrated by Junior Polatkin, tells the story of his time in school on and off the reservation. He is subjected to cruel treatment by his classmates and by his second-grade teacher, Betty Towle. He finds success as a basketball player, though he endures racism and suspicion from coaches of opposing local teams. He graduates valedic...
Somebody Kept Saying Powwow, also narrated by Junior, tells the story of his long friendship with Norma, James Many Horsess wife.
Witnesses, Secret and Not is set in 1979; a thirteen-year-old unnamed narrators father has been summoned to the police station in Spokane to answer questions about the disappearance of Jerry Vincent, a man who went missing ten years earlier. His father reminds the questioning officer that hes been brought in nearly every year to answer the same que...
Response 1: For many, stories begin with “Once upon a time,” establishing setting and mood for the characters and plot that follow. In Sherman Alexie’s “A Good Story,” the story begins with the narrator’s mother telling him, “You should write a story about something good, a real good story” (140). It is the reader, not the ...
Dec 10, 2021 · 0:00. -10:46. Paid episode. The full episode is only available to paid subscribers of Sherman Alexie. Subscribe to listen. A Good Story. An audio-only reading of a short story. Sherman Alexie. Dec 10, 2021.
On the experience of reading his past work years out from its completion, he himself remarked that he once declared: “that’s memoir.” Now, Alexie has finally written a true memoir: You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me is a memoir of Alexie’s relationship with his mother, written alternatingly in prose and verse. There are 78 pieces ...
978-0-06-097624-8. OCLC. 30437035. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is a 1993 collection of interconnected short stories by Sherman Alexie. The characters and stories in the book, particularly "This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona", provided the basis of Alexie's screenplay for the film Smoke Signals. [ 1][ 2][ 3] The ...
