Audrey Immel

Honors 345A

4 June 2017

Temporal Disjointedness in “Distances” and “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven”:

Exploring the Indian Urban Identity

As a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian, writer, and current resident of Seattle, Sherman

Alexie is to many an icon and spokesperson for the “Urban Indian.” About 71 percent of

American Indians live in cities and Alexie wholeheartedly embraces his position as part of this

often forgotten demographic (Williams). In an interview with The Atlantic Unbound, Alexie

bluntly stated that “to pretend [he’s] just a Rez boy is impossible” (Chapel). Alexie’s collection

of intertwined short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, focuses mainly on

reservation life in Spokane. However, two stories in this collection distinguish themselves by

exploring the isolating experience and intratribal exclusion of the Urban Indian.

“Distances” and “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” (“Lone Ranger”) are

two stories that appear to share little in common besides their similar themes of Urban Indian

identity. Alexie distinguishes “Distances” from the rest of the stories by excluding any familiar

characters and settings. Set in a hypothetical future where Wovoka’s ghost dance prophecy has

come true, “Distances” explores a world where all the White people have died while the Indians

survive. The “Urbans,” Indians who lived in cities during this apocalyptic event, are ostracized

from the tribe and thought to carry a sickness. With this science fiction backdrop, “Distances” is

a surreal and parabolic social critique of tribal exclusionary politics towards White and urban

life. In contrast, “Lone Ranger” is a realistic and partially autobiographical account of a

transaction at 7-11 and the narrator’s experience living in Seattle with his White girlfriend.

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Despite Alexie’s strikingly distinct narrative choices in these two stories, I argue that they must

not be read separately. Because of their presence in the same collection, “Distances” and “Lone

Ranger” supplement and juxtapose each other in a critical way; when read as a pair, the two

stories expose the duality of the Urban Indian identity. In both stories, Alexie’s inclusion of

anachronistic dreams, technology, and ghosts contributes to a sense of temporal disjointedness

and isolation within the narrators; in “Distances,” these narrative elements point to the narrator’s

longing for modernity and urban life. Contrastingly, in “Lone Ranger,” these narrative elements

reveal the narrator’s dissatisfaction and loneliness in his current urban setting. Alexie

incongruously detaches each narrator from his present yet in opposite ways, pulling one towards

modernity and the other towards tradition. It is the juxtaposition between these departures in time

that represents the balance of identities within the Urban Indian.

Dreams play an important role in both stories in creating a sense of temporal

disjointedness. Both narrators are launched out of their respective time periods by a dream, the

contents of which signify their longing for an unexpressed aspect of their identities. In

“Distances” Alexie draws attention to the randomness and isolation of the narrator’s dream by

isolating it on the page and giving no surrounding context:

“Last night I dreamed about television. I woke up crying” (108).

This statement repeats twice throughout the story, each in the same isolated maner. The focus

given to television in “Distances” contributes to temporal confusion in two ways; the television

is archaic in the fictional world of “Distances” as the Whites have died and television is now

considered an artifact. Simultaneously, television represents twentieth century, modern urban life

—the context in which the story was written. Simply by making an artifact of a futuristic item,

Alexie disorients the reader and reflects the confusion of the narrator. The ambiguity of “I woke

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up crying” makes it unclear whether the narrator fears television or misses television, or both.

Thus, this dream could either signify a longing for or condemnation of modern urban life; a life

that the narrator is prohibited from. James Cox, author of Muting White Noise: Native American

and European American Novel Traditions, interprets Alexie’s inclusion of this dream as the

latter option:

…television is an instrument of late-twentieth century colonialism.

In Alexie’s fiction, conquest narratives disseminated by the

technological tools of the dominant culture, such as television,

have pervasive, destructive influence on Native America.

Cumulative references to television’s destructive presence on

Alexie’s fictionalized reservation indicates this Euro-American

technology is an iconographic evil against which the Spokane must

struggle (Cox 56).

However, this interpretation of television oversimplifies Alexie’s nuanced exploration of the

modern Urban Indian identity. “Distances” reveals the antithesis to 20th century colonialism,

where the tribe rejects anything representing modern urban life and White culture. The narrator

is forced to return to precolonial times where “Euro-American technology” is forbidden. Yet this

world is more dystopian than idealized, as marriages between “Urbans” and reservation Indians

are forbidden, White people’s houses burned, and the elderly killed. These dark elements of the

story point to Alexie’s misgivings about rejecting all facets of White, urban life. The epigraph in

“Distances” from the Ghost Dance prophet, Wovoka, also develops a dystopian tone for the

story:

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 All Indians must dance, everywhere, keep on dancing. When Great

Spirit comes this way, then all the Indians go to mountains, high up

away from whites. Whites can’t hurt Indians then. Then while

Indians way up high big flood comes like water and all white

people die, get drowned…Then medicine man tell Indians to send

word to all Indians to keep up dancing and the good time will

come. Indians who don’t dance, who don’t believe in this word,

will grow little, just about a foot high, and stay that way. Some of

them will be turned in to wood and burned in fire—Wovoka, the

Paiute Ghost Dance Messiah (Alexie 104).

This epigraph establishes the parabolic element of “Distances.” The Ghost Dance provides

Alexie a framework for criticizing extreme tribal conformity and the ostracization of Urban

Indians. Television may be a modern instrument for propagating White mass culture, but Alexie

offers a parallel example of 19th century Indian mass culture. Tom Farrington’s essay, Breaking

and Entering: Sherman Alexie’s Urban Indian Literature, acknowledges the imperativeness of

the Ghost Dance to Alexie’s commentary on the Urban Indian:

The inclusion of this epigraph does more than just highlight the

distance between nineteenth and twentieth century Indian

identities; it invites an important question for the reader to consider

over the subsequent pages: is a pantribal movement still a relevant

method of cultural empowerment when many urban Indians feel

excluded from their tribes? (Farrington 76).

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If the epigraph exposes a disconnect between twentieth century Indians and their ancestors, like

Farrington suggests, then the narrator of “Distances” is the incarnate representation of this

disconnect. The temporal leaps in this story, from a 19th century prophesy, to a post-apocalyptic

world, to the narrator’s fascination with television, signal the narrator’s disconnect with his

present.

Alexie creates a similar temporal tension in “Lone Ranger” with a dream, but does so in

reverse; the futuristic dream in “Distances” is juxtaposed with a 19th century Western dream in

“Lone Ranger.” The narrator discusses his frequent “crazy dreams” and how they “became

nightmares more often in Seattle” (185). This revelation establishes the city as a foreign and

unsettling place for the narrator. Alexie makes this discomfort specific to the issue of Indian

identity by describing the nightmare that made the narrator leave the city in the middle of the

night. The narrator dreams that his White girlfriend “was a missionary’s wife and [he] was a

minor war chief.” Because of their love, war broke out between all Indians and Whites, resulting

in every tribe and the United States cavalry participating in the bloodshed (186). Alexie removes

the narrator’s individuality by characterizing the narrator and his girlfriend as mere

representations of their communities in the dream. It is the narrator’s inability to separate his

traditional Indian identity from his individuality that leaves him displaced both in Seattle and in

modern times. While in “Distances,” the narrator dreams about a modern aspect of urban life, the

narrator in “Lone Ranger” dreams about a scene from the past, disconnecting himself from

Seattle. These dreams, when placed next to each other, reveal the parallel yet opposite sense of

displacement in each narrator’s environment and era.

The narrator’s dreams about television in “Distances” is only one example of Alexie’s theme

of incongruous technologies in both short stories. While all technologies contribute to a sense of

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temporal disjointedness and disorientation, the clearest symbol of time is the watch in

“Distances.” The watch is one of the white man’s artifacts and is believed to have infected the

Urban Indians with a disease by falling “between their ribs, slowing, stopping.” (107) Farrington

suggests that the watch between their ribs is a metaphor for the Urban Indians “absorption of

‘white’ culture causing the Urbans to become both anachronisms and anatopisms: out of time

and out of place” (79). The narrator’s perception of watches confirms the distinction between

White and Indian culture; he remembers how the watches measured time “exactly, coldly” while

he measured time with “[his] breath, the sound of [his] hands across [his] own skin”. Alexie’s

comparison between time in the urban White world and the Indian world appears to criticize the

urban concept of time. However, the immediate next line adds humor and ambiguity to this

criticism. The narrator’s confession that “[he] make[s] mistakes” draws attention to the absurdity

of demonizing a rather useful device, regardless of whether its origins are from the Whites (109).

Alexie also draws focus to each narrator’s interest in communication technology. In

“Distances,” the narrator salvages a transmission radio from a White person’s home and hides it

from the rest of the tribe. Like the television, the narrator both fears and holds on to this relic of

the White and urban world. The radio becomes a symbol for the character himself as the story

progresses; an anachronistic presence that must escape the judgement of the tribe. Alexie’s

personification of the radio supports its symbolic parallels with the narrator; the narrator holds it

“gently, as if it were alive,” and when he finally turns it on, “all [he] could hear was the in and

out, in again, of [his] breath” (109). Alexie both impedes and advances the narrator’s attempt at

communication with this wordless discourse; the narrator fails at reaching a connection to the

modern world that the radio represents. However, perhaps the sound of his own breath signifies

success in reaching an unactualized facet of his identity.

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 The telephone contributes similarly in “Lone Ranger” as a literal and symbolic technology

for communication. After the narrator returns to the reservation from Seattle, he eventually gets a

job answering phones in Spokane. He wonders whether “the people on the other end of the line

know that [he’s] Indian and if their voices would change if they did know” (189). Although he

works in a city, the phone for the narrator represents a barrier to fully connecting with the non-

Indian, urban world. The phone is also a partial connection to the urban world when the

narrator’s ex-girlfriend calls him from Seattle. Alexie indicates the gravity of this call by having

the narrator wonder how he could “talk to the real person whose ghost has haunted [him]” (188).

Alexie’s description of this woman as a ghost establishes her as a haunting embodiment of the

narrator’s past life in the urban world. While on the phone, the narrator could “hear her breathing

in the spaces between [their] words”—an interaction that closely mirrors the narrator’s breath on

the radio in “Distances” (188). As in “Distances,” this lack of words evokes a sense of isolation

and inability to communicate.

Alexie contrasts this “ghost” from the urban world with a ghost that shows the narrator’s

draw towards tradition in “Lone Ranger”. The story ends with the narrator living alone in the city

Spokane, once again away from the reservation. The narrator wishes that he lived “closer to the

river, to the falls where ghosts of salmon jump” (190). In contrast to the unsettling nature of his

ex-girlfriend’s “ghost,” these salmon carry a wistful connotation, representing the historical and

depleted life source of his tribe. Living in the city and away from this history, the narrator is

isolated from his community. Alexie externalizes the narrator’s isolated emotional state with

description of sensory deprivation in his environment; the narrator “turn[s] off all the lights [and]

lie[s] quietly in the dark (190).” Regardless of the connotation of each ghost in “Lone Ranger,”

both displace the narrator from his present and associate the city with loneliness.

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 Alexie’s inclusion of ghosts in “Distances” carries this same displacing effect by forcing the

narrator’s cultural history upon him. Consistent with the surrealistic aspects of the story, the

ghosts in “Distances” are the literal incarnations of the narrator’s tribal ancestors. Alexie

distinguishes this return of tribal tradition from the ghost of salmon in “Lone Ranger” by

characterizing these ancestors as intimidating and vicious:

The Others have come from a thousand years ago, their braids gray

and broken with age. They have come with arrow, bow, stone ax,

large hands. ‘Do you remember me?’ they sing above the noise,

our noise. ‘Do you fear me?’ they shout above the singing, our

singing...Sometimes they come back. The Others, carrying salmon,

water. Once, they took Noah Chirapkin, tied him down to the

ground, poured water down his throat until he drowned (108).

Alexie makes the ancestors’ presence overwhelming and imposing for the narrator with the

layering of auditory details in this excerpt. The Others’ clear corruption of their cultural authority

augments the disconnect between 19th and 20th century Indians; Alexie depicts tradition in

“Distances” as overbearing for the modern Indian, perhaps for fear of failing to uphold this

tradition. While the salmon held a positive connotation in “Lone Ranger” as a symbol of tribal

history, here, this history is harshly imposed—literally shoved down the throat of a current tribal

member. Alexie’s choice of Noah Chirapkin as this tribal member further adds to his

commentary on the Urban Indian; “he’s the only Skin [the narrator knows] that has traveled off

the reservation since it happened” and “walked through a city that was empty” (106). This

character’s fascination with urban life and subsequent punishment highlights the fear of tribal

judgement faced by Indians who leave for cities.

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 Alexie’s depiction of the urban Indian experience is polarizing in the world of Indigenous

Literature, partly because of its grim implications. The anachronistic characters of “Distances”

and “Lone Ranger” point to an inability to find a comfortably intersecting identity as an Indian in

the modern urban world. Alexie’s narrative elements of dreams, technology, and ghosts in both

stories contribute to revealing the narrators’ conflicting inner identities; one side belonging with

the reservation and its traditions, the other longing to depart. Many literary critics have analyzed

these stories separately, along with Alexie’s other fiction, for its classification as Urban Indian

literature. I offer that a comparative analysis of “Distances” and “Lone Ranger” is a necessary

extension of existing discourse on The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Both stories

comment on the urban Indian experience but from complementary angles; the parabolic and

surreal premise of “Distances” provides a necessary distance between Alexie and his criticism of

exclusionary tribal politics. The realistic and intimate story of “Lone Ranger” offers personal

evidence of this sense of exclusion and isolation. Alexie’s own embracement of urban life, while

acknowledging the isolation it can produce, offers one man’s proof that two identities can, in

fact, exist within the same person.

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 Works Cited

Alexie, Sherman. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. New York: Harper Perennial,

1994. Print.

Chapel, Jessica. “Interviews: American Literature.” The Atlantic Unbound. 1 Jun. 2000.

Cox, James. “Muting White Noise: Native American and European American Novel Traditions.”

American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series, vol. 51: 2006.

Farrington, Tom. Breaking and Entering: Sherman Alexie’s Urban Indian Literature. PhD

Dissertation, The University of Edinburgh, 2015.

Williams, Timothy. “Quietly, Indians Reshape Cities and Reservations.” The New York Times.

13 Apr. 2013.

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