In the short story "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven," the unnamed Native American narrator travels through late-night Seattle while dealing with a recently ended relationship with his white girlfriend. Throughout his journeys, it is clear the narrator is dealing with a kind of guilt based on this relationship and the separation from his roots on the reservation. He journeys throughout the city, sometimes getting lost, saying, "Seems like I'd spent my whole...
In the short story "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven," the unnamed Native American narrator travels through late-night Seattle while dealing with a recently ended relationship with his white girlfriend. Throughout his journeys, it is clear the narrator is dealing with a kind of guilt based on this relationship and the separation from his roots on the reservation. He journeys throughout the city, sometimes getting lost, saying, "Seems like I'd spent my whole life" looking for something familiar.
The narrator eventually reveals the fact that since he is Indian, he doesn't belong in Seattle with his white girlfriend:
There's an old Indian poet who said that Indians can reside in the city, but they can never live there. That's as close to truth as any of us can get.
This guilt and lack of belonging leads the narrator back home to his Spokane reservation. The narrator returns to his roots—including basketball—and finds a sense of himself, eventually accepting his limitations and then journeying back out to the white world.
Sherman Alexie often uses salmon, which served as a source of life for his tribe, as a talisman for his characters' lost roots, and this is no different here. At the end of the story, the narrator says he is back in Spokane but wishes he "lived closer to the river, to the falls where ghosts of salmon jump."
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