Telling Identities: Sherman Alexie’s War Dances

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Sherman Alexie’s collection of stories and poems, War Dances (2009), plays with fictions, with the art of constructing stories, identities, and, thus, interpretations of the world.¹ By probing the juncture between reality and representation, Alexie asks the oldest questions in a fresh, new voice: How do we attempt to know each other and to narrate experience? He launches investigations into the power of the imagination and the tricky reach of language as it articulates lived lives and selves. His polyphonic text enters the canons of contemporary US and world literature, where it can converse with great writers of the past and present. His contemporary myth-making or constructs of the human experience engage metadiscursively with the project of fiction as a philosophical question. Alexie reflects our own world back to us by asserting new aesthetic spaces that invite us to question the power and consequences of defining identity and documenting reality in language. In War Dances, the life-art connections are often scattered or tenuous as fantasy estranges or elements of the absurd seem to skew our expectations.² Strangely enough, many characters clearly resonate with their creator: the writer-narrator who suffered serious childhood illness, the lustful teen out of place, the confused father/son confronting desire and death.

Various themes tie the diverse texts of War Dances together: loss, change, identity, and the past’s reach into the present. The fundamental question of War Dances, however, the one that weaves these arguably disjointed pieces into a wonderful cohesive fabric is, Who gets to tell the story? And as a corollary, How do the tales we tell represent or relate to reality? In many of the poems and stories in War Dances, one finds a fierce rejection of being defined, edited, or otherwise silenced. Alexie investigates the vestiges of such violations in his book. The most powerful response he proposes is the very act of fictionalizing—not only the author in the act of writing but an editor splicing scenes, a child imagining the heroism of a pop star, a voyeuristic traveler fantasizing connections with strangers, the news media spinning a tragic accident into a hate crime, the way a eulogy can refashion a life. Alexie presents again and again the seam between fiction and reality as it complicates our perception and interpretation of the world. He acknowledges language’s failure to fully capture our experience yet revels in the intricacies of our attempts to render it sensible.

Who gets to tell the story? Sherman Alexie does, but this project proves less straightforward than it may appear. Postmodern negations of authorship and narrative twists aside, War Dances plays with the power of representations in a remarkably subtle and searching way. Alexie offers alternatives to mainstream depictions of Amerindian and US culture with such success that he now enjoys superstar status. However culturally marked, War Dances confronts broader human questions lodged within carefully defined characters as it speaks of life, deprivation, and change in diverse voices.³ Individual personas represent discrete identities in conflict or collusion with hegemonic mainstream culture. Alexie allows his characters to take responsibility for their own views and for their often-flawed choices.

The author celebrates his established place within the canon of US literature. In War Dances alone, Alexie evokes many great compatriot authors, all stylistic innovators and, in one way or another, nonconformists. Explicitly, he names Whitman (120), Melville (171), “bad dads” Faulkner and Hemingway (101), then Fitzgerald (49), Cheever (170), and others in the course of following his characters through their maneuvers and meditations. Implicitly, he alludes to additional literary icons as he philosophizes on topics from representations of the human experience to strategies for survival. For example, Paul Nonetheless’s contention that “Americans were shockingly similar,” for they “all know the lyrics to the same one thousand songs” (118) seems reminiscent of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, in which she insists on the lack of individuality amongst her discourse community. The concluding couplet of “The Limited,” “the only life I can save / is my own,” echoes Flannery O’Connor’s gothic...