Storytelling and the Futility of Facts

Sure, it's well-written and insightful and all that, but does anything ever really happen in Sherman Alexie's collection of short stories? It's quite feasible that the answer is no, but why shouldn't it be? Does the author have any responsibility to provide us with true actions of consequence or could it instead be an experience of consequence?

Magical Realism. A literary term, but more often a term of dismissal as something not “real”. I've heard it used everywhere from a means to slight a major author to a condemnation of my own work. But, why do we have this desire for “real”? If reality is what we crave so badly, why read fiction to begin with? To prevent this from turning into a rant, let's turn to LR and Tonto for guidance.

Obviously, we could say that the entirety of the crazy stories never take place at all. That he's just inventing silliness and exaggerations. This doesn't harbor much in the way of analysis. Let's look a little closer.

In the trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire we see a man who has brought to court on charges in the vicinity of nothing-at-all. As Builds-the-Fire tells stories to explain his innocence, he mentions being a horse slaughtered by Colonel Wright and that he still carries “his letter of that day which justified the coming slaughter”.

There's a lot to unravel there. First and foremost, Thomas was a horse, eh? On top of that, he was a horse that lived over 100 years before his trial is taking place. Pretty far out. Must be that dastardly magical realism. What might not be noticed if not looking too closely is that, though Thomas begins to read the letter after saying he has carried it with him all these years, he never pulls the thing out. He says he has it, then starts talking.

So much of the action of LR takes place this way, without ever explicitly saying that anything happens. Items appear, people go places without the reader ever being told that they traveled. While in many cases this could simply be the author speeding up the plot and avoiding getting bogged down in remedial action, it happens far too often in LR to be coincidental. On top of that, Alexie is an incredibly purposeful writer so it's hard to imagine something like this would be lost on him.

But really, what this all comes down to is that the stories are more powerful than fact. They mean more. They exist as action in a way that actual action never could. So why does nothing happen? Because “real” occurrences are overrated.