Violence, Poverty, and Loss Theme Analysis

From the collection’s first story, “Every Little Hurricane,” readers are thrust into a world defined by extreme poverty, casual and tragic violence, and a haunting, pervasive sense of both cultural and personal loss. As Victor watches his uncles Arnold and Adolph fistfight in the middle of an approaching hurricane, he notes how the rise and fall of their violence against one another mirrors the trajectory of the storm—it is unthinking, destructive, and undoubtedly a force of nature.

Violence is a constant throughout Alexie’s stories—sometimes the violence is tied to motivations such as love and hatred, as is the case with Victor’s uncles’ fistfight, but often the violence is random, or senseless, or due to an ineffable sense of loss and frustration. Alexie uses violence this way to mirror the rippling effects of the pervasive historical violence against Native Americans. The confusion, anguish, and profound sadness of that violence creates a sense of hopelessness and of futility in the face of it. As a teenager, Victor mercilessly beats Thomas Builds-the-Fire, one of his childhood friends and a young man blessed with intricate storytelling abilities. An Indian woman is sterilized by her doctor after giving birth to a son. Bloody and even fatal car crashes abound throughout the narrative, and more often than not, they’re due to a driver’s intoxication. A man’s body is ravaged by cancer—his “favorite” tumor is the size of a baseball. When Victor moves off of the reservation and into a Seattle apartment with his white girlfriend, their relationship is plagued by intense verbal conflict and, occasionally, physical violence. A police officer robs Victor and his wife during a sham of a traffic stop. All of these violent acts and more are just a sampling of the intensity of a life calibrated by generational trauma and an intimate understanding of what it feels like to always expect the next blow, the next slight, the next random act of personal or institutional violence.

Reservation life is rendered carefully but never romantically in this collection, and the devastating effects of inescapable poverty permeate every page. The reservation is alternately a haven and a prison for Alexie’s characters—the lack of opportunities and cyclical nature of reservation life creates a veritable whirlpool of destitution, danger, and rampant substance abuse. The ubiquitous and pervasive subjugation of Native peoples provides the majority of Alexie’s characters with little outside of the reservation to hope for—off the reservation, Alexie notes,“ among white people, every Indian gets exaggerated.” Some characters work hard at minimum-wage jobs or are let go from their jobs without warning; some characters are robbed by authority figures; one character saves dollar bills in a shoebox; one character seeks a loan from the tribal council in order to travel across the country to collect his father’s body. There is rarely enough money for good food, and what little money there is is often spent on alcohol. Alexie engages common stereotypes about reservation life in order to express to readers the maddening cycle of poverty, neglect, desperation, and abuse that plagues many Native Americans. He depicts money as a resource that is simply unavailable to many Native people, and the fruitless pursuit of it is a frustrating disappointment that is, unfortunately, both commonplace and expected to the majority of his many characters.

In one story, a group of Indians at a party “remember their own pain. The pain grew, expanded… The ceiling lowered with the weight of each Indian’s pain until it was inches from Victor’s nose.” The influence of individual pain on the collective community’s experience of pain—and vice versa—is revealed deeply in these sentences. After Victor’s father dies in “This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” Victor notes that though he had “only talked to [his father] on the telephone once or twice, there was still a genetic pain, which was soon to be pain as real and immediate as a broken bone.” The Native American experience as rendered within these stories is one of profound and seemingly unending loss on both a personal and cultural level. The decimation of Native American peoples, traditions, and agency over the course of the last 500 years has left a mark, so to speak, in the hearts of each of Alexie’s characters. Some bear the loss with grace, and others bear it with anger and resentment, but Alexie never casts judgment or proclaims any one way of dealing with such staggering cultural loss as the “right” way. Though the stories jump around from character to character, perspective to perspective, one thing the book’s arc never loses sight of or interest in is the way Native Americans confront—or don’t confront—a generational pain and loss that is difficult to comprehend and impossible to forget.