The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistf ight in Heaven 143and (sadly) laughing Indians, and she wants to hear
a different kind of story, without loss and without
failure. She needs to hear that things can be okay,
that things are not the way Junior depicts them. She
feels that Indians are not always on a downward
spiral, that good things happen all the time, and so
Junior picks a good thing. The events of the story
are small, intimate, personal—a moment of joy in
a life literally collapsing. Uncle Moses’s house rep-
resents a central emblem of the story. Hand-built
and structurally unsound, it is a monument to Uncle
Moses’s achievement and his limitations. The house
is not held together by sound engineering, and it will
not outlast the life of the tribe like the pyramids of
Egypt or the Pueblo rock dwellings, but it will hold
together as long as willpower and memory can graft
its oddly aligned walls together. Like the figure of
Uncle Moses or the mother who requests Junior’s
story, the house exists on tenuous strings of hope,
struggling against the apparent failure of its faulty
edifice in order to survive in its own right. It takes
little to prop these figures up, but they are not strong
in and of themselves, and they are aware of their
frail state. This knowledge leads to a sense of what
should have been, what could be, and ultimately
a struggle against regret: holding one’s head high
in the face of impending collapse. “A Good Story”
binds Alexie’s collection together by signifying
the instinctive tribal resistance to the almost over-
whelming sensibility of regret throughout the rest
of the novel’s episodes.
Significantly, “A Good Story” is presented as
a story within a story, framed by Junior’s mother’s
request while she is quilting. Quilting is a curious
activity. It is expressly concerned with bringing
disparate, yet complementary, elements together to
form a cohesive, comforting whole. Junior’s story—
and the story he tells—serves much the same literary
action. Lone Ranger and Tonto is a series of difficult
episodes which the mother accurately describes as
sad and, alternately, Junior adds, hysterical. They are
often both funny and terrible simultaneously, and
while Alexie’s work can be sympathetic and inter-
esting, it also relates tales of loss, failure, death, or
(worst of all) hopelessness. Each separate story adds
its distinct element to the whole of the work; each
tells its story of Indian experience. “A Good Story”
is much like the central patch of a quilt, the linchpin
patch that is the key to the quilt’s narrative. That
moment of hopeful camaraderie between the elder
generation and the youngest, between mother and
Junior and Uncle Moses and Arnold (significantly
named, as well), highlights the possibilities for hope
in the Indian reservation. These hopes are small,
limited, personal, and temporary: a sandwich, a story,
an afternoon of dawdling time. The loss of hope
apparent in this limitation is staggering. There is
nothing left for the tribe, for the reservation, or for
the future to create tradition, history, or reverence.
All that remains is the passing of time.
In producing such a moment in “A Good Story”
as the “good things” that happen to Indians, too,
Alexie poignantly highlights this central regret of
the overall narrative. Like the grandmother, Alexie
seems to desire more than the grim truths of his
sad stories, but he can only satisfy this need with
the smallest of stories, without tradition, without
history, and without mythology. Only in the stolen
moments are there good stories in a world perme-
ated with the regret of what was, what could have
been, and what will never be.
Aaron DruckertraditiOn in The Lone Ranger and Tonto
Fistf ight in Heaven
Tradition plays a central role in the stories of The
Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistf ight in Heaven. But
tradition conceives a cultural identity that is both
ever-present and perceptibly lost in Alexie’s vision
of his people. While the iconic images of the Native
American healer and dreamer appear, and images
of the “fancydancer” and the storyteller are repeated
throughout the novel, our conventional notion of
tradition is usurped by the “new,” the present real-
ity of the Indian nation. In the new tradition, a boy
learns early that he has already failed, just by being
born on the reservation. Like his ancestors, he will
strive, he will dream, he will find his first drink, and
he will settle into a life of restless failure. Tradition,
often a source of a people’s pride, is instead called
a “drug,” a placebo against the tide of injustice and
despair inflicted upon (and buoyed by) Alexie’s pic-
ture of Native American life.