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 3rd 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.