Reading through a Filter

The short story “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” was so interesting to me. I think it was the narrator that did it for me. His voice, being a sort of stream of consciousness, sort of kept me on my toes. Because of the way he jumped around from different parts of different stories, I was always waiting to read what would happen next.
At first, I also loved how raw he seemed. He did not seem to sugar coat anything. However, I came to be unsure of how reliable of a narrator he was. Maybe he was too raw? Maybe things were too “real”? Specifically the encounter with the 711 clerk. The way that the clerk reacted to the narrator felt a little inflated to me. Sure, a third shift convenience store clerk would constantly be uneasy, afraid of a robbery. However, I sensed that the narrator’s account of things was blown up a bit, seeing as it was influenced by his perception that all whites were afraid of him and his fellow Native Americans.
I also was concerned with his stories about his girlfriend, especially when they broke up. Her saying “I love you and don’t ever come back,” seemed fairly unrealistic to me. And again, when she called him at his job at the end of the story.
“What’s going to happen to us?”
“I don’t know. I want to change the world.”
People do not say those sorts of things. It was almost as if he changed the story so that it would strike the reader that much more. Or, again, possibly that is simply his perception of things. Either way, I found myself filtering the narrator’s words.
Again, I still very much loved the story because of the way in which it was written. The stream of conscious was truly captivating to me.