Questions

In Sherman Alexie’s “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,” I found the scenes depicting the interchange between the narrator and the 7-11 clerk particularly interesting, as I feel that they best illustrate the unreliability of this narrator. The clerk’s words may be his own (and accurately recounted by the narrator), but his actions, his thoughts, and his emotions are all minutely described by the narrator as though he knew exactly what the clerk was thinking at all times. Since this story is told in the first person point of view, it is impossible for the narrator to know these intimate details about another character. The narrator may guess and make assumptions about the other character, but he can never know if these assumptions are true.
The narrator’s characterization of the clerk as a nervous, lonely individual probably stem from his own experiences. After all, the narrator himself once worked the night shift at a 7-11, where he “got robbed once too often” and was once even “locked in the cooler” (181). Such a traumatizing experience must have stuck with the narrator and made him instinctively wary when inside convenience stores at night. Even though he is the customer, he imagines that the clerk feels the same fear he felt when working in such a potentially dangerous location at such a vulnerable hour. The narrator also refers to the clerk as “[not] ugly, just misplaced and marked by loneliness” (183). We know at this point in the story that the narrator is also lonely, having gone through a bad break-up while living in Seattle (where he worked as a 7-11 clerk himself). This is another example of the narrator projecting his own emotions onto the clerk: the narrator was once “home alone, flipping through channels and wishing he could afford HBO or Showtime,” so he assumes that this clerk shares in his poverty and loneliness (183). Perhaps most tellingly of all his statements, the narrator finally asserts that “There was something about him I liked, even if it was three in the morning and he was white” (184). This sudden yet strong empathy for a complete stranger implies that the clerk reminds the narrator of himself (even though the clerk “was white” while the narrator is Native American). Clearly, we as readers are supposed to question this narrator’s reliability in telling the story, and by questioning him, we must also question why he would feel this need to assume that others automatically label him as “dangerous” just because of his appearance; why he assumes he “would just get…into trouble” if he stated aloud that he “didn’t really fit the profile of the country” (183). Questioning the motives and instincts of the narrator should lead us to question ourselves and our current, white-dominated society – why else would the narrator feel the need to subconsciously adopt this instinctive assumption that others fear him because of his ancestry if there was no truth to this assumption?