The Use of Trickster Figures in Native American Literature

Trickster figures often appear in Native American narratives and mythology, ranging from ancient oral tradition to contemporary fiction. The use of the trickster figure becomes a literary device for ameliorating tension caused by opposites, usually in relation to complex notions like identity and one’s place in the world. The trickster is hard to define because its very existence comes to symbolize the inability to easily categorize. Much like the fool in Shakespeare’s work, the trickster in Native American literature is a figure who serves a revelatory purpose in the most ironic and unexpected ways, telling a truth about reality that otherwise may go unnoticed. Although the use of tricksterism is an age-old narrative device in mythology and folklore, the use of this figure in contemporary American literature has proved pertinent to the understanding of cultural identity for those who often feel they are straddling two worlds.

Trickster figures are not typically the focus of a story, although they may be the driving force behind it. Tricksters often lurk in the background, their presence felt when they are not even physically present. From the Fourth World of the Hopi Indians to Sherman Alexie’s contemporary Native American fiction, the trickster figure is an enduring character that brings about revelation and compromises for the central figures of the stories. Trickster figures might be shape-shifters, animals, humans, or a combination—the point is that they evade definition. As Franchot Ballinger states in the article “Ambigere: The Euro-American Picaro and the Native American Trickster”: “The Trickster—incorrigible, insatiable, deceptive, comic and transforming—is a nearly ubiquitous figure in world tribal literature” (21). It seems that the formation of the trickster figure is a kind of archetype or universal means of reconciliation as it appears in so many narratives throughout time and from around the world.

Native American literature has often used the trickster figure as a means of highlighting essential questions about existence and identity. The multiplicity inherent in the trickster figure mirrors the complexities of characters and paradoxes that exist within life. A trickster might cause one to ponder the forces of good and evil or other dualities that are not often so easily understood in real-life situations. A trickster figure might also point to the different sides of the self and how we as humans identify ourselves.

In contemporary Native American literature, the trickster figure has figured prominently in the understanding of cultural identity within the larger American context. Sherman Alexie’s stories often talk about this kind of dual identity. A character that shows up often in Alexie’s collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is Thomas Builds-the-Fire. Thomas is not an easily identifiable trickster, but he functions in the collection as a representation of storytelling within a story. In the story that bears his name, “The Trial of Thomas-Builds-the-Fire,” this once mute character present in other stories finally regains his speech, signifying the ability to tell one’s own story. Tricksters might often portray violence or be deceptive, but these outward appearances signify something more meaningful within. When Thomas takes the stand and regains his speech, it is not surprising that his tales are filled with violence. Thomas is literally doing what Alexie’s collection as a whole seeks to do: to situate itself within historical discourse by re-telling the story—the identification of the Native American within the White American cultural climate. Similar feelings of angst surrounding identity ignite many of Alexie’s other characters, especially those who are still growing up and trying to figure out who they are.

From an anthropological perspective, Ellen B. Basso quotes Kerenyi who describes the trickster as “the spirit of disorder, the enemy of boundaries” (Basso 292). Basso encourages us to turn away from concern of categorization in regards of the trickster figure that so often comes to represent the self, acting as a mirror. Basso explains that myths, popular forms of Native American literature,are, to a great extend ‘studies of self’ in which subjectivity in the form of private motives, choices, interpretations, feelings, and goal orientations contribute to the narrative formulation of personality processes, character development, and consistencies and changes within the operations of life. (293)

In this way, trickster figures are themselves a type of mythology by which we self-reflect and ameliorate existential concerns.

The formation of identity is a traceable theme throughout Sherman Alexie’s short story collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, and the text itself actually is a means of both solidifying identity through language, particularly storytelling, and also destabilizing stereotypes of native peoples prescribed by the White population—those who had previously monopolized the master-narrative of history and ideology in the United States. Thus, both the form and the content of the stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven mirror identity formation, an often chaotic and painful development, through which we come to understand the collection’s most important achievement; Alexie has realized that by engaging in narrative discourse, perpetually and inevitable in flux, storytelling is the only way for natives, or any oppressed peoples, to free themselves from the historical myths created by the White colonizers.

To locate Alexie’s text in a larger literary canon is challenging in many of the same ways the characters in his stories find difficulty in identifying themselves. It is crucial to consider the unique circumstances of Native Americans and their colonizers and to understand that it is problematic to group Native American literature under the postcolonial umbrella. Jyotirmaya Tripathy could have had Alexie in mind when he claims, “native culture and literary traditions resisted and continue to resist the White American colonial assumption,” and furthermore, he asserts that to include the Native American experience in the postcolonial canon would require a broadening of how we define and conceptualize the postcolonial (40-43). Tripathy adamantly points out the importance of remembering that the White settlers, the Americans, were both colonizers of the indigenous people and the colonized by Britain, however, the latter in no way aligns them with the natives (43). Tripathy takes to task the very term “postcolonial” in which “post” suggests some sort of aftermath—decolonization and regaining of indigenous lands (43). Here we are presented with two imperative distinctions that eliminate the Native American experience from the widely accepted definition of postcolonial—these incongruencies being both temporal and spatial. There is no “post” in the colonization of the natives, so to speak because the colonization has never ended. The concept of time is a recurring theme throughout Alexie’s collection making it hard to believe that he wasn’t pondering these same postcolonial assumptions when he writes in “A Drug Called Tradition” that

…Indians never need to wear a watch because your skeletons will always remind you about the time. See, it is always now. That’s what Indian time is. The past, the future, all of it is wrapped up in the now. That’s how it is. We are trapped in the now. (22)

And later, in “Distances,” we get an even more fatalistic description of time: “The Tribal Council decided it’s a white man’s disease in their blood. It’s a wristwatch that has fallen between their ribs, slowing, stopping” (107). Tripathy calls the concept of time a fundamental difference between Western and Indian consciousness: “Time, in the native worldview, is never linear and one cannot leave one’s past behind nor be civilized by relinquishing everything Native American” (51). Time itself functions as a trickster figure as it is imagined as circular and repetitive, and thus the past and present are one and the same (Tripathy 51). Similarly to temporality, to think of the native experience in terms of physical space lost and regained is non applicable because the natives have been relocated with no hope of regaining their indigenous tribal lands. Tripathy asks how, then, are natives to decolonize themselves if they do not fit the criteria of postcolonial subjects, to which he proposes:

[T]hey can certainly contest and subvert civilizational residues that were imposed on them. Here decolonization takes the garb of psychological and conceptual warfare intent upon decolonizing not only the natives’ sense of history but also their minds. It is here that the postcolonial project becomes a critique of Western epistemological and civilizational complexes masquerading as history… (43)

Keeping in mind Hayden White’s well-known assertion that all history is a narrative, there is no better way to engage in the “psychological and conceptual warfare” anticipated by Tripathy than to participate in the discourse surrounding native identity, which is precisely what Alexie’s collection achieves.

Although the very essence of the trickster figure evades definition, we can see by examples of myth and contemporary Native American literature that tricksters trick us into realizing something about ourselves that we had previously overlooked. In Alexie’s collection, it might be identified as both a Native American and simply an American; it could be the concept of time that rules our schedules but is itself an arbitrary and elusive notion; and it could also simply be a reconciliation of binaries and paradoxes like nature and culture that, in the end, we find a sense of harmony through the ironic methods of the tricksters in these narratives.

Works Cited

Alexie, Sherman. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. New York: Grove,2005. Print.

Ballinger, Franchot. “The Euro-American Picaro and the Native American Trickster.” MELUS. 17.1 (1992): 21-38. Web. 17 November 2013.

Basso, Ellen B. “The Tricksters Scattered Self.” Anthropological Linguistics. 30.3 (1988):292-318. Web. 18 November 2013.

Tripathy, Jyotirmaya. “Postcolonialism and the Native American Experience: ATheoretical Perspective.” Asiastic 3.1 (2009): 40-53. Humanities International Complete. EBSCO. Web. 17 November 2013.

White, Hayden. The Content of the Form. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1990. Print.