Style

Alexie employs postmodern practices of writing to tell his stories. Some of these practices include weaving historical figures and figures from popular culture with characters created by Alexie. For example, in "Crazy Horse Dreams" he uses the Sioux warrior Crazy Horse as a symbolic presence to explore how the imagination effects ways in which people in the present respond to one another. In other stories, he uses Jesus Christ, Jimi Hendrix, the Lone Ranger, and Pete Rose as cultural icons that serve as touchstones of personal meaning. Alexie also challenges readers' ideas as to what makes a story by cobbling together diary entries, dream sequences, aphorisms, faux newspaper stories, multiple narrators and stories within stories to tell his tales. One of the most obvious examples of this occurs in the story, "The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire," in which Thomas takes on the persona of a number of historical...