The Lone Ranger

The Lone Ranger

B

The narrator of the story is a Native American man, who works at a high school exchange programme. He lives in solitude among strangers trying to find an identity fitting both the Indian and the white society.

His dreams take him back to a battlefield where Indians and whites are fighting and killing each other. But the battle doesn’t stick to his dreams only, it continues in the real life as well. One of the things that reflects this is his relationship to his white girlfriend from Seattle.

This battle is neither violent nor bloody, and the weapons are replaced with harsh, painful words, but sometimes a hateful word can hurt more then a punch in the stomach. Although he loves his girlfriend and vice versa, they can’t live together without fighting and arguing. It’s probably because they grew up with different background and values.

He is full of anger towards whites, because he discovered that things similar to what he saw in his dreams had really happened in the past. “I’ve read similar accounts of that kind of evil in the old West”. Maybe that’s why he vents his rage on his girlfriend, and the fight between Indians and whites becomes a fight between him and her. It seems like the historical persecution of the Indians is affecting their relationship, although it’s something that has happened more than a century ago, and none of them have participated in the persecution nor been persecuted.

Conversely, his girlfriend doesn’t feel hate and anger, but has prejudice towards Indians, which can be seen in the statement: “You’re just like your brother”, she’d yell. “Drunk all the time and stupid”

In my eyes with this statement she applies to the Indian race as whole, not just the brother. That’s why the narrator feels so offended and hurt.

Sometimes he used to drive in his car all night, so he could be away from his girlfriend. He kind of feels trapped in their apartment, and the open roads give him some kind of freedom or space to breathe. The bad dreams and the fights with his girlfriends make him flee back home to the Spokane Indian Reservation. He doesn’t necessarily go home, because he really wants to be there, I see it more as desperate act of escaping from the white society. “I wanted to tell him that I didn’t fit the profile of the country….”

He is drinking, so he can escape from reality and his responsibility. Maybe he is afraid from failing, because his people expect so much of him. “But I was special, a former college student, a smart kid. I was one of those Indians who was supposed to make it…” Indian Reservations are often places with high unemployment, and that’s why he comes back here, so he doesn’t have to struggle. But still he is not left in peace by his mother. If he was an average Indian it would have been acceptable to be unemployed, but he has gone to college and is expected do something with his life.

After he looses the basketball-game to the white game he “wakes up” from his despondency in a way. He finds a job, where he can hide his identity behind the phone, and maybe that’s why it works. He can’t quit, can’t give up and explain with whites judging him by his race, because they can’t see him.

In the end he wishes that he was living closer to the nature and his ancestors. He imagines these fantastic surroundings, where he is supposed to be, where he feels he belongs to. A place where Indians can live without any limits sat by the white man. But he knows that his wishes will never come true, because he still has the same nightmares, which means that nothing has changed, the world is still the same and he is still an