Patriotism and Incitement
Any time you come across a radio host who begins an ideological harangue by addressing his listeners as “citizens” and “folks” you can be pretty sure it is ultra-right wing conservative radio host. With that in mind, it perhaps becomes easier to picture in your head the voice delivering these metaphorical complaints intended to incite violence:
“Folks, I’m tired. I’m tired of witnessing the downward spiral of this country…Europeans sailed to this country with the hopes of building a new civilization, a better civilization…we didn’t come here to suckle at the morally bankrupt teat of the government.”
Sleep and Death
The strange and mysterious world of sleep where dreams reign and eternal night turns out to be not so eternal once the sun rises has spurred many a writer to metaphorical philosophizing. Alexie is no rebel on the subject:
“Sleep is a little piece of death, he thought, and Zera found some peace in that temporary afterlife.”
Indians and the Homeless
One character creates a metaphorical connection between the homeless in American and Native Americans through a comparison of their how America treats both groups:
“she believed that homeless people were treated as Indians had always been treated. Badly. The homeless were like an Indian tribe, nomadic and powerless”
Basketball and Jesus
A crowd watching a basketball reveals in a rather unexpected way just how much the Native Americans in the novel are really into the game of basketball. Except that most of the crowd isn’t even paying attention.
“The Indians who were watching the game reacted mightily to each basket or defensive stop. They moaned and groaned as if each mistake were fatal, as if each field goal meant the second coming of Christ.”
Anger and the Devil
The protagonist of the novel, John Smith, is a profoundly young man who was ripped from his mothers arms right after birth and handed over to the affluent white couple who had adopted him. This separation and inability to live in two words while belonging to neither drives him to madness. But first into a church where he makes a metaphorically rich confession:
“All the anger in the world has come to my house. It’s there in my closet. In my refrigerator. In the water. In the sheets. It’s in my clothes…in my hair. I can feel it between my teeth…All the time the anger is talking to me. It’s the devil. I’m the devil.”
