Sherman Alexie's Short Stories
Emptiness as Theme of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
Sep 14, 2008
"Crazy Horse Dreams" best represents Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven short story collection thematically. This story and its protagonists embody the range of characters introduced to the reader throughout the work. In "Crazy Horse Dreams," Victor and the woman with the woven shirt represent themselves—and their own deferred dreams—but they also function symbolically as all of Alexie’s characters.
Victor’s Encounter with the Woman with the Woven Shirt
While the encounter between Victor and his partner is clearly sexual, the dialogue they share provides evidence of Alexie’s overall theme of emptiness and loneliness. Victor and the woman most clearly are two people with very different desires and yet very similar needs. They simply cannot find fulfillment in one another and are ultimately left with nothing.
While Victor wants a woman of tradition, perhaps a woman whose woven shirt is not manufactured by a company in Spokane, he instead meets a different kind of Native American woman. He discovers someone quite modern, quite like himself. This woman he meets is “more a child of freeway exits and cable television, a mother to the children who waited outside 7-11 asking him to buy them a case of Coors Light” (41).
She can offer little tradition, for she is a woman not of custom and ritual, but of buses and fake “authentic” shirts (38). And, in turn, this contemporary woman is searching for Crazy Horse, for a dead warrior: “She thought she could watch him fancydance, watch his calf muscles grow more and more perfect with each step. She thought he was Crazy Horse” (41).
As both search for specters of the past, neither is able to give the other what he or she desires, and both are left empty. Victor tells her, “You’re nothing important…You’re just another goddamned Indian like me” (41). And he is correct; she is just like him, longing for the tradition and rituals and meaning of the past and finding nothing.
Victor’s Response Echoed in Other Characters’ Lives and Various Stories in Collection
During their encounter, Victor realizes this short woman is not what he thought: “You’re nothing. You’re nothing,” he says and leaves (41). The reader hears Victor’s words silently echoed by each character throughout the stories as parents and children and lovers abandon and are abandoned, and as ambitions and dreams quite literally become nothing.
His words can be shouted in response to the illusive effects of drugs and alcohol, which callously deprive characters of everything and leave them with little. And just as Victor’s words, and Alexie’s theme of emptiness, echo throughout this collection, Victor and this nameless woman represent characters from the other stories who experience loss.
They represent Junior, alone and lost, at community college. They are Tremble Dancer forever searching for tradition. They are Dirty Joe, drunk at the carnival. They symbolize James, who is five years old and does not speak. And they are Jimmy Sixteen-and-One-Half-Horses, who will soon be buried and nothing. Victor and the short woman searching for Crazy Horse are all of the reservation Native Americans, left empty—literally and figuratively—on rationed foods and little hope.
Sherman Alexie’s theme of emptiness and unrealized dreams is woven throughout his collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. The theme is made clear in "Crazy Horse Dreams" not only through the interactions and dialogues of Victor and his partner, but also through the overwhelming sense of loss and emptiness with which the reader is left.
Grove Press, 2005, 0802141676
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