Introduction “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” is one of Sherman Alexie’s foremost collections of short stories. The compilation deals with the lives and troubles of Indians in and around the Spokane Indian Reservation. The stories take a fresh, occasionally agonizing, look at life for modern Indians on the Spokane Reservation In the universal theme that pervades many of Alexie’s tales here and in his other writings. The themes of alcoholism, violence, and death are all infused in this collection. But, what actually makes the hardships of the Indians in and around the Spokane Indian Reservation bearable to the reader is the excessively used hilarity and empathy that Alexie has used in the anthology. The narratives here by and large interrelate, referring to the same events or at least the same characters, generating a narrative that almost flows between stories. The characters in these stories have not reached “happily ever after,” it is not apparent if they will ever get there. Alexie introduces the themes he will develop throughout the book such as the relationship between the real and the imaginary, reservation poverty, and the idea of memory as an index of social and individual identity. Victor is a fictionalized version of Alexie, as the author has admitted. Symbolism in “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” The Lone Ranger and Tonto are symbols for white and Native-American identity, respectively. The names are taken from a popular radio and television show of the 1950s in which a white man, the Lone Ranger, teams up with an Indian, Tonto, to battle evil in the old west. The book begins with a tormenting scene. In the opening story, “Every Little Hurricane,” a boy named Victor (who is either a central or a secondary character, is either a child or an adult, in a number of the stories), describes a New Year’s Eve bash at his parents’ house as if it were a hurricane. Since Victor awakens from a reverie (prejudiced by television news), to the incoherent, exaggerated noises of the party, the references to the hurricane have a factual as well as a symbolic quality. The weather forecast is for a hurricane, and the narrator surveys the uncanny conduct of many of the Indians on the reservation, many of them drunk and angry, recalling some wrong that had been done to them. The story also contains a flashback to when Victor was five years old and his parents could not afford to buy him anything for Christmas. Victor is a fictionalized adaptation of Alexie, as the writer has admitted. Nine-year-old Victor roams through his house while a night-long party swirls around him like a hurricane. A blood-spattered fistfight erupts between his two uncles Adolph and Arnold, in the front yard, and the boy witnesses, “…they had to be in love,” he presumes. “Strangers would never want to hurt each other that badly.” “Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock” uses the playing of that song as a recurring symbol of a boy’s attachment to his nomadic father. In this story, Victor recounts memories of his father coming home drunk during the 1960s and listening to Jimi Hendrix play “The Star Spangled Ban