The Outcomes of Violence Within Two Cultures

For the literary analysis/synthesis essay, I chose to compare the violence within the two stories by Walker and Alexie. I found that this was my best essay of the semester (next to my argumentative essay, of course!), so here is one of the better analysis' of the essay.


While Maggie’s flighty nature is caused from one horrific fire, Sherman Alexie’s character in "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven" seems to have had a history of violence for most of his life. As an Indian, Junior may have inherited this violence from stories that began on his family’s reservation before he was even born. Junior’s violence is displayed physically in the book. He explains that him and his girlfriend “would argue and I’d break a lamp, just pick it up and throw it down” (Alexie 340). Junior mentioned he was an alcoholic, and often seemed to find excuses to pick on and argue with his girlfriend. This is because he may have been more disturbed about his past and wanted to find ways to forget it.
Relating to Junior’s past and his family’s history, Gordon E. Slethaug explains that Junior “finds himself both inside and outside his own experience, caught in the seam between past and present” (Slethaug). Apart from his physical violence, Junior describes his dreams from his past that often haunt him. They involve death and destruction, mostly centered around battles between white settlers and Indian tribes. Specifically, he described a scene from a vivid dream where he said, “Three mounted soldiers played polo with a dead Indian woman’s head” (Alexie 341). The trends in his dreams demonstrate that he is angry about how his ancestors were treated and how he thinks he does not “fit the profile of the country” (Alexie 339) because of it.