Post-Colonial Vision – Quest (ing)

in Alexie’s novel, “Flight”

Lesson Objectives

• To introduce Author Sherman Alexie

• To introduce the concept, Intertextuality

• To survey some of the literary devices Alexie uses to position his text as post-colonial discourse

Sherman Alexie Bio• Born: October, 1966, Spokane Indian Reservation,

Wellpinit, Washington.

• Born with water on the brain & survived without brain damage agains all odds

• Suffered seizures in his childhood and spent most of those years as an ostracized introvert.

• Chose to attend high school off-reserve where, apart

from the school mascott, he was the only Indian.

• 1985: graduated Reardan High and went on to attend Gonzaga University in Spokane on scholarship. After two years at Gonzaga, he transferred to Washington State University (WSU) in Pullman, WA.

• Holds a BA in American Studies; won the 1991 Washington State Arts Commission Poetry Fellowship & 1992 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship.

• Likes fantasy/sci–fi and good horror: hates Quentin Terantino

Indigeneity, Identity, Intertextuality

Modern Aboriginal societies will be a blend of modern Western and traditional Aboriginal societies…young people…learn their own history, cultural practices, and language from Elders, written curricula, and video images while listening to rap music, watching Beverly Hills 90210, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Superman and Batman comics (Newhouse, 2000; 403).

Julia Kristeva 1966

The fundamental concept of intertextuality is that no text, much as it might like to appear so, is original and unique-in-itself; rather it is a tissue of inevitable, and to an extent unwitting, references to and quotations from other texts. These in turn condition its meaning; the text is an intervention in a cultural system.

From: The Literary Encyclopedia. http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1229

The layered and multi-dimensional meanings of a text represent “a mosaic ofquotations”, while the text itself is a part of a larger mosaic of discourses

Intertextuality can be characterized as “authorial intention” mediated by “audience context”: in order to ‘get the joke’ both auteur (storyteller) and audience must share similar socio-cultural experiences and understandings.

Like its author, Flight is a product of the sort of hybrid, post-colonial Indigenous identity discussed by Newhouse…

Alexie was inspired by Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five”, As were other American ‘auteurs’

Stephen King: Flight contains references to The Dead Zone ,

The Stand & Carrie

90’s T.V. Series, Quantum Leap

Flight is a Post-Modern, Post-Colonial Narrative. Alexie:

• Frames the action within a familiar sci/fi trope: “Alternate Reality(ies)”

• Develops discrete, but interrelated sub-plots

• Positions the text within his larger bodyof “metafiction” (e.g. the title)

• Uses a hybrid POV

• Situates the plots in or on the threshold of modern America:

19th, 20th & 21st Centuries

• Critiques modernity

• “speaks back” from the margins of colonial society

Flight is a journey of self-actualization

• Zits is at once no one and everyone through most of the novel

• one counselor points out that he has never become a fully realized human being (p. 6)

• A man at the bank remarks to Zits as he pulls out his guns, “you’re not real” (35)

• Zits remains nameless until the last chapter when we learn his name is Michael

Zit’s quest to become a “real” boy

Deux Ex Machina: God From the Machine

• The main device that drives Flight’s plot forward

• In western fiction, it’s considered a “twinkie” plot device

• When used in Post-Colonial context, it makes more sense

• AE and DXM are consistent with Indigenous notions of “reality” time, & space

Trickster TrajectoryLike Billy Pilgrim & Sam Beckett,

Zits’ reality has been hijacked by the powers that be

Zits is sent careening through time, space, race, & physicality, actualizing their fluidity & permeability

At times the irony of his situation doesn’t escape Zits: “God is one funny deity dude” (84)

Although Zits has no control over when/where/who he will be next, he recognizes that, “none of this is random” (85)

Trickster Treachery: “Meting” Justice

“In order to fight evil, we must do evil things.” (Art, 38)

“Justice made killing make sense. But it doesn’t, does it?” (Zits, 57)

The dark half of trickster’s duality is manifest in Justice

Charismatic but evil aka Charles Manson, Jim Jones, David Koresh

Zits & Justice’s jail cell meeting strongly parallels that of Lloyd Henried & “The Walkin’ Dude” in King’s The Stand. Both men are “saved” by a character with preternatural knowledge and insight who holds them in his thrall & manipulates them into doing evil

The Five Incarnations of Michael

#1: Hank Storm, FBI. Zits learns about the complexity & sometimes contradictory nature of humanity

• He awakes in a “small and cheap and filthy motel room…where a million ugly people have done a million ugly things.” (Zits, 37).

• “Hank makes the world safe. He is a good and loving father. He is one hundred different versions of himself, and only one of them is a killer…God, I think I would kill for her kiss.” (Zits speculates about Hank’s wife: 58).

#2: a native boy on the eve of greasy grass…

• “I’m running through the dark. I’m running toward the sound of laughter. I run toward a bright light in the distance.” (59)

• “Maybe God forgave me and sent me to Heaven – a stinky heaven. And, ok, maybe God didn’t forgive me completely, so he put me in a kid without a voice. But that’s o.k. I can live without a voice as long as this man…keeps loving me like he does.” ( Zits, 65).

# 3: Gus the Indian Scout

“I open my eyes to reveille. Somebody blares away on his …bugle…I can hear people running and yelling outside the tent…I guess I must be a soldier now. I wonder which war I’m fighting? I wonder who I might have to kill now? But what can I do? There must be some way to escape. I have to make something happen.” (80).

#4: Jimmy, the pilot

“I’m flying…I’m the pilot…I fly just below a ceiling of clouds and above the ocean. If I flipped the plane over, the ocean would be my ceiling and the clouds my floor, and it would not matter…all of it is interchangeable. All of it is equally important and unimportant. All of it is connected. I am the pilot and the clouds and the ocean and the plane (107).

#5: His father

“When I open my eyes, I am staring at a rat. No, wait. The rat stares at me. It’s a huge wharf rat, two feet long, with intelligent eyes. And the rat seems to be thinking, You’re too big to kill, but I’m going to take a bite out of your ass anyway” (131)

There’s No Place Like Home…

The alarm clock wakes me up at 7 A.M. It plays Blood Sweat & Tears. Really. That song called “I Love You More Than You Will Ever Know.” The one my mother used to sing to me. (Zits, 175)