Essay About The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

If you’re active on social media, you must’ve run into one of those images where there are, essentially, two shapes in that one image. Maybe a friend showed it to you or vice versa, and maybe you found that they saw something different at first glance than you did. This is called perception, defined as “the ability to see, hear, or become aware of something through the senses” according to the Oxford Dictionary. Perception is one of the most important concepts to take into account as you interact with others, and that is precisely what Sherman Alexie is trying to convey through many stories in his book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Alongside alcoholism and racism, perception is one of the most prominent motifs throughout the book, connecting “Every Little Hurricane” to “Jesus Christ’s Half Brother is Alive and Well on the Indian Reservation” to “Family Portrait” via the way that we see things and how it makes up our life.

We see the theme of perception come to a start immediately at the beginning of the book. “Every Little Hurricane” begins at a loud, ardent party, where Victor, one of the main characters, is hiding in his room. All in all, the party is interrupted by a fight erupting between two of Victor’s uncles, Arnold and Adolph, and a mention follows that the attendees were worked up and this quote: “Memories not destroyed, but forever changed and damaged” (4), the memories in question of those who witnessed the altercation. This illustrates that their perception of the fight altered their perception of their memories and damaging them. We often hear the saying, or alternatives of it, that memories make up a person because people act based on what they believe, and what they believe stems from what happened to them in the past. This, and with someone’s perception of their memories being damaged, demonstrates how perception can easily change our lives in an instant.

While some of the motifs in this story- for example, tradition, time, and technology- are more subtle, perception is defined as important in this book firmly with the story “Jesus Christ’s Half Brother is Alive and Well on the Indian Reservation.” Our narrator- unnamed and unknown, but presumably Junior, Victor’s friend, and another main character, based on the other stories- ends up in the custody of a baby named James after both of James’s parents die in a house fire. James doesn’t talk for a very long time or cry either, but when he finally does the former, he speaks a number of interesting quotes to our narrator. “He says the sky is not blue and the grass is not green. He says everything is a matter of perception” (128) are two of them. These two sentences complement each other because someone who might be colorblind to blue or green would not perceive them as blue or green. We all react to things differently depending on how we see them: if we don't see a conflict as destructive, we won't intervene. People see things differently, and that's what makes people contrast, and that's what this book is attempting to convey, particularly in regards to racism, misogyny, colonization, and other issues.

Perception isn’t all made up of our mind’s thoughts and memories. There are conditions in which our perception is flawed (like being colorblind or just blind). One of these makes an appearance in “Family Portrait.” At the beginning of the story, we see that Junior translates words like “please” into “sacrifice” (191) and we learn why with this quote from his mother: “No, it was grand mal seizures punctuated by moments of extreme perception” (194). Extreme perception is a medical condition where everything is amplified, like sound being too loud, which is referenced with the quote “The television was always loud, too loud, until every conversation was distorted, fragmented” (191) and vision being too bright. Because of this, he perceives words differently, like the please and sacrifice but also “‘Dinner’ sounded like ‘Leave me alone’” and “‘I love you’ sounded like ‘Sacrifice’” (191). This implies and shows that perception can influence how we see and hear things, and therefore, how we react to them.

After all of these instances of perception in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and more that didn’t make it in, it is clear that perception is one of the most influential motifs represented throughout the book. Our perception of the events before us can affect our memories, how we react, and therefore affect the people around us and what happens from that point onward. Other motifs like racism, family, and trauma make perception so important in this book because all of these are affected heavily by how you view each problem, certainly a constant in the former. By the end of the book, it is certain that Alexie was trying to make a point with this ongoing pattern of perception: that we need to pay attention to others’ viewpoints or suffer the consequences. Maybe the world would be a better place if we had just stopped for a second to consider that we are all human, and maybe the attendees of the party from “Every Little Hurricane” would do a little better if Adolph and Arnold had stopped to consider this too.