Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie
"Reservation Blues" is Sherman Alexie's first novel, published shortly before he turned thirty, following the success of his earlier poetry and short story collections. The novel creatively intertwines the Faust myth with the experiences of Native American life on a reservation, encapsulating themes of survival, anger, and imagination. Central to the story is Victor, who, along with friends, encounters the legendary blues guitarist Robert Johnson, who has made a pact with the devil for a magical guitar. This encounter leads to the formation of a band that includes two Flathead women, Chess and Checkers, and explores their journey toward fame and success.
As they navigate the music industry, the narrative unveils the harsh realities and exploitation faced by Native artists, particularly in their interactions with predatory agents symbolizing historical injustices. Key figures in the story, such as Big Mom, serve as embodiments of cultural wisdom, while the humor present in the narrative is often laced with a sense of pain and irony. Overall, "Reservation Blues" combines elements of satire and cultural critique, reflecting on identity and the complexities of life on the reservation through a blend of imagination and harsh realities.
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Subject Terms
Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie
First published: 1995
The Work
Sherman Alexie’s first novel, Reservation Blues, was published before his thirtieth birthday and after the striking success of The Business of Fancydancing (1992), a collection of poems and stories published by a small press when he was twenty-six. By the time his novel was being reviewed, nearly eight thousand copies of The Business of Fancydancing were in print, along with two additional collections of poetry, Old Shirts and New Skins and First Indian on the Moon, and a heralded book of short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, all published in 1993.
In his novel Alexie reasserts an equation that he formed in “Imagining the Reservation,” from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven: “Survival = Anger ’ Imagination. Imagination is the only weapon on the reservation.” Reservation Blues is arguably the most imaginative of his works to date, blending, among other things, the Faust myth with life on the “rez” and the dream of making it big in the music world. Alexie has performed in his own blues band.
The novel is haunted by the bad memories (the essence of the blues) and by several characters’ nightmares, including Junior Polatkin, Victor, and Thomas Builds-the-Fire, all of whom are familiar from other stories and poems by Alexie. The role of the deity in the novel is played by Big Mom, who lives atop a mountain on the reservation and has powerful magic. The story gets underway when a black blues guitarist from Mississippi, Robert Johnson (a historical personage) who has sold his soul to the devil (a white man known as “The Gentleman”) for a magic guitar wanders onto the reservation and passes his literally hot guitar to Victor.
On their way to success and fame the group acquires a pair of vocalists in Chess and Checkers, two Flathead women, and two groupies, Indian “wanna-be’s,” Betty and Veronica, named after characters in the Archie comic series. When Betty observes that white people want to be like Indians so they can live at peace with the earth and be wise, Chess says, “You’ve never spent a few hours in the Powwow Tavern. I’ll show you wise and peaceful.”
The destruction of the dream comes when the group goes to New York, where they find that their exploitative agents are none other than Phil Sheridan (source of the words “The only good Indian is a dead Indian”) and George Wright (who commanded the soldiers that slaughtered the Spokane ponies in 1858, a recurring motif in Alexie’s work). They work for Calvary Records. This novel encompasses broad humor, but the laughter is almost always painful. The satiric thrust, the travel, and the ironies attendant on innocents abroad suggests that Reservation Blues belongs to the tradition of Voltaire’s Candide (1759).
Bibliography
Bellante, John, and Carl Bellante. “Sherman Alexie, Literary Rebel.” Bloomsbury Review 14 (May/June, 1994): 14-15, 26.
Busch, Frederick. “Longing for Magic.” The New York Times Book Review, July 16, 1995, 9-10.
Kincaid, James R. “Who Gets to Tell Their Stories?” The New York Times Book Review 97 (May 3, 1992): 1, 24-29.
Price, Reynolds. “One Indian Doesn’t Tell Another.” The New York Times Book Review 98 (October 17, 1993): 15-16.
Silko, Leslie Marmon. “Big Bingo.” Nation 260 (June 12, 1995): 856-858, 860.