Sherman Alexie's short stories and his cinematographic elements in them

Abstract

The Spokane writer, Sherman Alexie, is enjoying not only his success as writer but also as producer and movie director of Smoke Signals and The Business of Fancydancing, adapted from his collections of short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto fistfight in Heaven and The Business of FancyDancing. The purpose of this paper is to show the intermingling of three devices which makes Sherman Alexie an outstanding storyteller of the stories of Native Americans living in the twentieth century and living within American society. The three devices are Native American culture, literature and cinema. On the one hand, we see how, through literature, Sherman Alexie’s short stories introduces to real and current Native American characters, far from the stereotyped images we are used to see, especially in films. At the same of introducing them to us, he introduces their culture in order to, for once and for all, give a truthful account of their history, their customs and their lives. To do so, Alexie borrows from the larger society one of the most reaching and the most important and effective tool to portray people: the cinema. Curiously enough, the cinema has been one of the most damaging instruments for Indians since they have always been portrayed as the evil part, the sidekick of the white guy or as the doomed Indians, but never as the protagonist of the story.