Flight and the Culture of Misreading Violence

Don’t let his simple sentences, time travel and teenage protagonist fool you: Sherman Alexie’s Flight explores more than just one boy’s quest for identity -- it is a story deeply concerned with the nature and repetition of violence.  Unlike most time-travel novels, the protagonist Zits’ forays back in time aren’t ordered chronologically or explained in any hard-science way.  Rather, in the midst of committing a mass shooting, Zits is pulled back to different instances of violence in history, prompting him to reflect on these instances as they relate to his own life, but also to larger forces of systematic violence.  Through Zits’ travels in history, his life experiences and candid narrative voice, Flight grapples with the deep and overwhelming questions of where violence comes from and how it is perpetuated. 

In American society, violence is usually discussed in terms of an individual perpetrator and the violence of a particular action.  This is the way mass media usually approaches coverage of violence, naming the particulars of the suspect and crime, and the way individuals often perceive acts of violence encountered in their own lives.  In this framework, the “root” of violence is situated in the individual, so understanding that violence involves psychologizing the perpetrator, often by assessing his or her mental health, emotional history, etc.  Although this framework for thinking about violence can be useful in some ways, situating the source of violence in the individual largely ignores the existence of structures that allow for that violence to occur across society.  Framing violence as merely individual aberrations rather than a social phenomenon displaces the larger question of how society facilitates violence.  That is, what larger social or political structures allow or even encourage violence to occur against particular peoples at particular moments?

During Zits’ travels, violence manifests from many individuals, yet this violence clearly does not originate entirely from them.  Violence Zits encounters is usually impelled from outside the individual, both in obvious and less obvious ways.  For example, during Zits first journey as Hank, his FBI partner Art shoots an Indian named Junior and then commands ‘Hank’ to shoot Junior’s dead body (53).  While it’s tempting to regard Art as the center of this violence, as the villain per se, the shootings are also the product of a political situation that requires Art to be violent.  Art, Hank, and the Indians meet on that night because of colliding political interests and forces.  Political and social marginalization of Native Americans allow the US government to more easily justify intervening in their community, one social force that allows for Art’s position.  Also, Art and Hank have guns and impunity in their use because of political and social constructs that designate FBI as protectors and government soldiers; in this case, these constructs do more than just facilitate violence, they require it.  These are some of the deeper constructs that work to allow violence in this episode. 

Alexie does not explicitly trace these deeper roots of violence, but rather hints at them through Zits’ observations and the formal motif of time travel.  In this manner, Flight is not an explication of the roots of violence but rather a rumination on how they manifest in society.  The episodes Zits is transported into don’t follow the typical logic of time travel stories, which often explore the past chronologically and through particular moment in history.  Rather, Zits’ travels appear connected thematically through violence and (in all but one episode) Native American history and experience.  Given the redemptive theme of the frame narrative – Zits, the abused foster kid who acts out in hate, but decides to turn himself in before committing the act – it’s tempting to interpret Zits’ time travel like George Bailey’s time travel in It’s a Wonderful Life or Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, as the lesson that teaches Zits the error of his ways.  However, Zits regrets his murderous spree immediately – so why does he inhabit all these bodies?  If he’s not learning to repent, what is he learning?  Or is he learning anything at all?

Rather than a mechanism for personal redemption, time travel is used to explore how violence is connected across time and distance.  Violence in these episodes isn’t entirely related to violent action; rather, violent action erupts out of a milieu of violence.  The echoes of past violence haunt every episode, prompting yet more violent acts, but also indicating the culture of trauma that facilitate violence, and the logics that go into sustaining that culture.  This isn’t an unfamiliar idea; for example, gang culture is regarded as a particular social environment that facilitates, in its very structure, violence as a form of social recognition.  However, it is harder to think about larger society this way, because of its sheer magnitude and because the rhetoric of violence is so different from the banal way people are used to thinking of their lives, even when they encounter racism, misogyny, and more on a daily basis.  It’s so much easier to believe violence erupts from a few crazy people than it is to believe it grows in the language we use, the way we relate to other people on a regular basis.  Violence is sustained, at least in part, by the way people think and talk about violence – this is the basis for a cultural milieu that allows violence to occur.  Themes that emerge in Flight as the structures that support violence are the justification of violence as a necessary way to manage social life, and the essentializing of people as internally violent (rather than responding to outside situations that facilitate or require violent response).

            For the most part, Alexie’s text does not glorify or justify some violence over others.  Explicitly exploring both violence done by Indians and by settlers, the text highlights how everyone is culpable for the continuation of violence.  The closest the text comes to supporting violence is during Zits’ time as Gus, when he stalls the soldiers pursing Small Saint and Bow Boy.  Yet even this episode doesn’t slip into heroic rhetoric, but rather questions it.  Ruminating on the reversal of his situation from bank-shooter to soldier, Zits asks, “Is there really a difference between that killing and this killing? … If I kill these soldiers so that Small Saint and Bow Boy can escape, does that make me a hero?” (105).  Zits does not have an answer for himself, but the question itself is important because it undermines the logics that justify violence.  Zits’ concern with the labeling of his action reveals that how society talks about violence shapes the ways it gets perpetuated.  Narratives that deal with violence often frame it through hero or victim narratives, a way of storytelling that focuses on the personal experience of violence and explicitly ignores violence as a larger phenomenon society perpetuates.

A key distinction in the text is between violent acts and violent people.  Blending action with identity is embedded in the language we use to describe people: someone who kills is a murderer; someone who steals is a thief.  The act becomes their identifier, a kind of branding that shapes their ongoing association with violence.  Zits, on the other hand, shunts these easy identities or labels.  His character separates the acts of violence from the essentialness of being; that is, violence manifests through actions, it is not a state of being (although, of course, violence can become so entrenched in social life that it becomes a person’s automatic way of relating).  Through his journey he questions the use of violence as an identity marker, the idea that a person is “programmed for violence” (27), as his shrink suggests he is.  Separating the notion of violence from the notion of the individual is crucial to recognizing violence as a social process that society facilitates through logics of justification rather than a personal attribute.

             The topic of violence, which is overwhelming in its expanse, is focalized interestingly through Zits personal experience and the use of time travel as a window into others personal experiences of history.  Placing Zits within the bodies of characters in time (instead of just a 3^rd person viewer) allow him to situate his own experience with violence in relation to larger social networks that make violence possible.  Yet for all its strength in offering a more complex, social approach to violence, Alexie’s text can still be read as being about a personal journey and maturation rather than a social rumination on violence.  Zits’ strong, colorful narrative voice makes the novel distinctive and a pleasure to read, but it also places Zits at the fore of the novel, which can distract from the novel’s deeper problems and themes. 

            When trying to discuss violence in the novel, it’s easy to fall back on descriptions of Zits and his personal experiences – in foster homes, with acne, etc.  While Alexie does link these motifs with larger problems (the way the foster care institution allows facilitates violence against the children it places, how acne is linked to poverty), the dangerous temptation is to ignore these connections in favor of the more obvious roots of Zits’ violence, viewing him as a Holden Caufield figure and tracing his personal transformation from angsty-teen to wiser-adult.  Psychologizing Zits is problematic because (along with the obvious problem that he’s a character and not a person) it adheres to the same perspective that the text seems intent on dislodging: regarding violence – and its solutions – as personal rather than social phenomenon.  Reading the text as a story of personal transformation limits its scope and the value of the themes it explores.

On that note, Zits’ move to a new foster home is both a happy and dissatisfying ending; it feels like a cop-out.  It does not resolve the underlying tensions of the text because the text is not really about Zits. It is about violence and how it permeates society.  It is about recognizing the structures that facilitate violence.  It is, tentatively, about trying to change these structures.  During Zits’ final embodiment as his father, he demands respect from a man walking down the street.  When the man humors him, Zits realizes he doesn’t know how to get respect so he asks the man to tell him a story (143).  Even with Zits’ demands, their exchange is companionable, unlike most of the interactions in the novel.  Their exchange is personal, predicated on the acknowledgement and acceptance of their differences.  This scene suggests stories as mechanism for relating to others instead of violence, a mode of relating that can be used to recognize and honor others through intimacy and vulnerability.

Yet even this proposal for the elevation of the story in human relations, remarkable as it is, seems like a flimsy solution to the myriad ways violence is perpetuated.  Alexie can hardly be blamed for not suggesting a solution to end all violence – it is, after all, a problem that’s plagued philosophers and laymen for millennia.  Finding a solution for all violence is not the text’s goal.  Flight is successful not so much in proposing solutions as in pointing out problems, namely the problem that 21rst century America has a culture of misreading violence.  Interpreting violence as a personal phenomenon limits the ways it can be dealt with, missing the elusive but critical structures that allow violence to occur.  Flight does more than just critique the existence of violence; it critiques the ways in which people’s reactions and treatment of violence shape and even reinforce the structures that make violence possible.  In the aftermath of mass shootings and flights into buildings, in the face of poverty and massacres, the question is always how did this happen?  Flight is a meditation on this question, and the findings it suggests are both uncomfortable and empowering: societal structures facilitate violence, so changing these structures is fundamental to changing violence in our society.