Open AccessThe Native American dream in Sherman Alexie's short story “One Good Man”
Author(s) -
Macarena Bustamante Álvarez
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
cultura, lenguaje y representación/cultura, lenguaje y representación
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.127
H-Index - 4
eISSN - 2340-4981
pISSN - 1697-7750
DOI - 10.6035/clr.2021.25.2
Subject(s) - dream , white (mutation) , identity (music) , native american , resistance (ecology) , comics , space (punctuation) , gender studies , history , literature , sociology , aesthetics , anthropology , art , psychology , philosophy , linguistics , ecology , biochemistry , chemistry , neuroscience , biology , gene
The purpose of this article is to discuss the idea of an Indian identity and the Native American Dream in Sherman Alexie’s short story “One Good Man.” In this story, Alexie introduces the idea of the Indian constructed by the White Americans and attempts through his characters to redefine that concept by deconstructing all the different stereotypes created by the White American society. In order to do this, he also introduces the idea of the American Dream that he calls the “Native American Dream” to express the social inequality and hopeless existence of the Indian community always immersed in an ironic and comic discourse. In this sense, Alexie proposes a new definition of the Indian identity looking back to culture, tradition and the space of the reservation. He creates in his fiction a space of contestation and resistance opening a new voice for the Native American identity.