Connor Little

11/23/14

Native American Literature

In Nothing But the Truth we have a surplus of Native American writers. One

of the most famous among these writers is Sherman Alexie. He is largely responsible

for creating realistic and relatable characters and delivering these to the masses.

Alexie was called one of the major Lyric voices of are time by the Times Book

Review. After reading some of his works and watching a film based of one of his

short stories I believe that he, if not one of the major Lyric voices of our time, is a

talented and understandable writer.

In one of my favorite stories by Alexie The Approximate Size of My Favorite

Tumor we are treated with a new main character unseen for the first half of the book

the Lone Ranger and Tonto have a fistfight in heaven. Jimmy Many Horses is by far

my favorite protagonist. He is a charismatic native living on the reservation with his

wife. He discovers that he has a tumor that he describes as “Just about the size of a

baseball, shaped like one to. Even had stitch marks”. After his wife lives him his

follows her with his friend Simon. He explains his situation like this “Ain’t joking

about the cancer” he said “But I started to joke about dying and that pissed her off.

Jimmy many-horses disguises his pain through humor in a way that many of us turn

to in the face of bad news. His realistic response really speaks to the reader in a way

that you don’t always get in other works. This makes this stand out among other

stories in nothing but the truth and short stories in general.

 While I may have learned about Alexie through his short stories he got his

start in poetry. In the business of fancy dancing we see a cynical side of Sherman

Alexie. We hear his philosophy that “A promise is just like money”. His belief that

that we often make promises we can’t keep and we often buy things with money we

don’t have. He also speaks of racism and how it happens in the real world. “ It’s

mostly the dark ones who are forced to sit in the chair especially when white people

die. It’s true, you can look it up”. Alexie also writes with a dry sense of humor and

occasionally writes his poetry sarcastically. Alexie’s excellent poem, How to Write

the Great American Novel is a guide on how to write a stereotypical Louis L’amour

type novel. “The hero must be a half-breed, half white and half Indian, preferably

from a horse culture. He should often weep alone. That is mandatory” if the “Indian

is female, she must be a healer”. He however ends on the dark note of “In the great

American Indian novel, when it is finally written, all of the white people will be

Indians and all the Indians will be ghosts”.

Sherman Alexie is a talented writer. His stories are very relatable and I

recently checked out another one of his books. I believe that his cynical and

relatable writing style earns him a spot as one of the greater writers in the past

decade and hope he can continue his greatness into the next few.