Summary
The anonymous narrator of this story tells about a time that Victor bought a used piano. He plays a Béla Bartók composition at the reservation carnival, and the music’s dissonance resonates with the Spokane audience, who feel it resonates with their troubled history. The narrator relaxes with his girlfriend under a picnic table and enjoys the simple beauty of the carnival.
A man named Simon wins the horseshoe pitch, the storytelling contest, and the one-on-one basketball tournament. He tells a story about how Indians used to be able to walk across the Spokane River on the backs of salmon, and reminds the carnival-goers that basketball was invented the year after the battle of Wounded Knee.
The story ends with a surreal interlude as evening falls. The Spokane run and dance, and an anonymous woman holds a mixed-race baby and remarks, “Both sides of this baby are beautiful” (148).
Analysis
In “A Good Story”, the narrator’s mother complains that he only tells bleak stories about life on the reservation. “The First Annual...” appears immediately after “A Good Story” in the collection, and in some ways, it functions as an example of the type of "good story" about reservation life that the mother was looking for. Although some of the characters harbor resentment towards white Americans and their culture, Alexie suggests that empathy and shared experience are the keys to overcoming historic grudges. The Bartók composition is the first hint of this kind of reconciliation. Although it was written decades earlier by a European composer and is very different from what the audience normally listens to, the Spokane identify a connection between the music's dissonance and the trauma in their community's history. This cross-cultural connection sets the stage for the anonymous woman’s observation at the end of the story that both sides of the mixed-race infant are beautiful.
“The First Annual...” straddles the line between realist and surreal narration. The first half of the story evokes the collection’s realistic stories about Victor, such as “Amusements” and “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona”. It features many of the same characters that appear in the other Victor stories, and the narrative style is fast-paced, emphasizing action rather than description. However, this story is unique in that it is about Victor but is narrated by a secondary character in the story, as opposed to an omniscient narrator or Victor himself. Yet the final section has more in common with the visions in “Crazy Horse Dreams” and “A Drug Called Tradition”. The last section’s style is impressionistic and emphasizes lush, poetic language over the utilitarian storytelling of the earlier portion of the story.
