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Ten Little Indians by Sherman Alexie A Los Angeles Times Best of the Best Selection A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book A Publishers Weekly Book of the Year A San Jose Mercury News Best Book and Top 20 Fiction Selection An Exeter Sunday Herald Top Outstanding Book A Coast Weekly Read It Now Selection A San Francisco Chronicle Best Seller A Denver Post Best Seller A Book Sense Best Seller ISBN: 0-8021-4117-X / ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-4117-0 US $14.00 - 5 1/2 x 8 1/4, 272 pp - Apr. 2004 |
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
We hope that these discussion questions will enhance your reading group’s exploration of Sherman Alexie’s Ten Little Indians. They are meant to stimulate discussion, offer new viewpoints, and enrich your enjoyment of the book.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Sherman Alexie has said that “the true purpose of art is to ask questions.” How faithful to this purpose is Ten Little Indians? What questions or ideas does Alexie ask us to consider? Do any of the stories seem especially provocative or disturbing? What themes emerge?
2. In Ten Little Indians the reader encounters a range of contemporary Indian characters. What is the effect of this encounter with Indians who are vividly drawn individuals? Does creating highly particular characters seem to be significant on the author’s part? Part of his meaning? Or is sharp attention to character simply a component of Alexie’s technique and literary sensibility?
3. “The Search Engine” opens the collection and is arguably important in setting the tone of the book. Considering the book as a whole, how significant is this choice if the reader undertakes the stories in order? Would the reading experience be changed by opening with the later story, “What You Pawn I Will Redeem”? Or with “Do Not Go Gentle”? Does the order of the stories have a logic to it?
4. In “The Search Engine” Alexie explores the romanticizing of Indians in American culture. The story’s protagonist, Corliss, worries that she will lose her “power and magic” once white folks understand “that Indians are every bit as relentlessly boring, selfish, and smelly as they are” and concludes that “that would be a wonderful day for human rights but a terrible day for Corliss” (p. 11). In what other stories does Alexie explore the consequences of seeing Indians, as Corliss says, with “goofy sentimentalism”? What are these consequences?
5. Is Alexie only interested in stripping his characters of sentimentalized Indian attributes? Does the reader see more than what Indians are not? What emerges as distinctive about the reality of contemporary Indian life? Are power and magic, in fact, excluded from it?
6. At the same time that tragic events large and small are touched on in his stories, humor in myriad forms rumbles throughout Ten Little Indians. What is the role of humor in Alexie’s work? In what stories does it crop up most? How does it affect you? How important is it? What would these stories be like without it?
7. The word joyous comes up more than once in the stories. How common in everyday parlance is this word? Would you consider it a word in frequent use, on par with happy or depressed? Did you notice it? What do you take it to mean? Does it connect to any of the book’s larger themes?
8. For Alexie’s Indian characters the impulse toward ceremony is natural and strong, and the ceremonies themselves seem improvisational and often untraditional. Basketball, for example, is central to the grieving ceremony of the protagonist of “Whatever Happened to Frank Snake Church.” Frank grieves the deaths of his parents through a game that is a mainstay of American life; the ritual climaxes with tribal syllables pounded on the floor. What is Alexie suggesting about ceremony and how it works?
9. Traditional literary and religious forms recur throughout these stories. Consciously and unconsciously, characters are moved to confessional narrative. They invent ceremonies to drive off grief and survive crises. They improvise personal odysseys and quests. A range of traditions comes into play—classical literature, Indian culture, Roman Catholicism. What does Alexie suggest about the force and importance of historically long-lived rituals and forms? What role do they play in our modern lives? What is he suggesting in the diversity of form evident in his work?
10. Confession is a particularly frequent literary device in Ten Little Indians. In “The Search Engine” a homeless man confesses to Corliss at McDonald’s. In “Can I Get a Witness” the female protagonist confesses her unconventional view of September 11. Why does Alexie turn to it so often? Why is confession as a form so attractive to a storyteller? Why is it so useful for Alexie in particular? What so often happens between Alexie’s confessors and auditors? What, does Alexie imply, is the power of story?
11. In its final line “Lawyer’s League,” a confessional monologue, lands with a question posed to its reader/auditor: “Do you understand I have a limited range of motion?” (p. 68). What, in full, is meant by this question?
12. In “Can I Get a Witness” a terrorist sneaks into a crowded restaurant and detonates a bomb. Had you sensed tension building before that point? Where? Why does Alexie attach the detonation to a sentence that begins in another way—with a humorous touch, with a search for a missing waiter?
13. “Can I Get a Witness” deliberately explores and expands upon the possible meanings of September 11. What was your reaction to the woman’s interpretation of the attacks for her personally and for others? How apt did you find the phrase “grief porn” for the media coverage. Does a post–September 11 consciousness infuse all of these stories? Some?
14. In “Do Not Go Gentle” a vibrator, Chocolate Thunder, inspires a mother to invent a ceremony that chases death away from her gravely ill child. The narrator reflects on this: “We humans are too simpleminded. We all like to think each person, place, or thing is only itself. A vibrator is a vibrator is a vibrator, right? But that’s not true at all. Everything is stuffed to the brim with love and hope and magic and dreams” (p. 101). Does Alexie suggest that we should change how we look at the world? Why? How does this meditation connect to other stories and their rituals and ceremonies? Where else and how else is magic touched upon?
15. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” a wedding guest is compelled by the ancient mariner to hear a wild tale of misadventure at sea. The guest does not want to listen and longs to rejoin the wedding party, but in the end, after hearing the story, is “a sadder and a wiser man.” “Flight Patterns” contains a confessional in a taxicab. At first, like Coleridge’s wedding guest, the protagonist, William, doesn’t want to hear the story of the driver, Fekadu. By the end, however, he wants to learn from Fekadu’s stories (whether they’re true or not). What does William learn? Why, at first, didn’t he want to listen?
16. In “Flight Patterns” two men discuss how people can become trapped by other people’s ideas of who we are, especially when we are seen in terms of our race. What is the nature of this trap? Is it dangerous? Or merely inconvenient?
17. In “The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above” the narrator chronicles his struggles—with his mother, with his Indian identity, and with how to think about white people. His mother became more Indian in the presence of their white friends. Why? What is Alexie suggesting about how we experience and even use our racial identities?
18. In “Do You Know Where I Am?” the Spokane male narrator recounts the story of his marriage. He and his Spokane wife have practiced their Roman Catholicism as they have their tribal religions, viewing them as “pitiful cries to a disinterested god” (p. 150). In their skepticism are these characters simply typical contemporary Americans?
19. The penultimate story, “What I Pawn You Will Redeem,” evokes the restless life of a homeless urban Indian. What are the tone and mood of this story? How did they affect you? What is the significance of the narrator’s discovery of his grandmother’s regalia in a pawnshop, priced inaccessibly? Does the story of his quest to regain her regalia have symbolic force? What is Alexie suggesting?
20. Like a symphonic leitmotif, three Aleut Indians come and go and eventually disappear in “What I Pawn You Will Redeem.” What is the role of these characters? Why are they in the story? What would the story be like without them?
21. Spirituality and religion come up quite often in these stories, though not in traditional contexts. In “Flight Patterns” William is described as not “particularly religious; he was generally religious” (p. 104). The gym is seen as a church in “Whatever Happened to Frank Snake Church.” Everyday elements can take on spiritual force, and different religious traditions intermingle. What does Alexie seem to be saying about the spiritual world today? How does it exist? In spite of modern life, which is culturally complicated and at least apparently impure, can a vital, credible spirituality exist? Does it exist already?
22. In his influential essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot explores the role of tradition in poetic creation. Tradition is of great value, he asserts, but it is more than blind adherence to the successes of the generation before you:
[Tradition] cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense . . . and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his contemporaneity. (Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”)
How traditional in this sense is Sherman Alexie? What sort of historical sense does he have? Does he, in his historical sense, blend together the temporal and the timeless?
23. In his essay “On Cannibals” the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne wrote about the lives of “savages.” Together with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Montaigne laid the groundwork for how Indians came to be known as “noble savages”:
These nations seem to me, then, barbaric in that they have been little refashioned by the human mind and are still quite close to their original naiveté. They are still ruled by natural laws, only slightly corrupted by ours. They are in such a state of purity that I am sometimes saddened by the thought that we did not discover them earlier. . . . It displeases me that Lycurgus or Plato didn’t know them, for it seems to me that these peoples surpass not only the portraits which poetry has made of the Golden Age and all the invented, imaginary notions of the ideal state of humanity, but even the conceptions and the very aims of philosophers themselves. . . . This is a people, I would say to Plato, among whom there is no commerce at all, no knowledge of letters, no knowledge of numbers . . . no divisions of property, no occupations but easy ones, no respect for any relationship except ordinary family ones, no clothes, no agriculture, no metal, no use of wine or wheat. The very words which mean “lie,” “treason,” “deception,” “greed,” “envy,” “slander,” and “forgiveness” are unknown. (Montaigne, “On Cannibals”)
How is Montaigne’s vision of “barbarians” and their “state of purity” evident in the contemporary understanding of Indians as Alexie depicts them? Consider this passage alongside Corliss’s assessment in “The Search Engine”: “White people looked at the Grand Canyon, Niagra Falls, the full moon, newborn babies, and Indians with the same goofy sentimentalism” (p. 11). Is sentimentalism evident in Montaigne’s passage above?
24. Ten Little Indians can certainly be read out of order, over time, with no particular attention to the continuity of the reading experience. The stories stand on their own. But read together, do the stories seem to focus on a particular overarching subject? In spite of their different subjects, do they form some sort of discernible arc?
25. Quite famously the title of Agatha Christie’s novel Ten Little Indians was changed in American editions to And Then There Were None to avoid any offense associated with the nursery rhyme. What do you make of Alexie’s use of the title?