SOURCE: Low, Denise. Review of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, by Sherman Alexie. American Indian Quarterly 20, no. 1 (winter 1996): 123–25.

In the following review, Low examines Alexie's short story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven in relation to postmodernist theory.

Peter Burger, in Theory of the Avant-Garde, notes that artistic works reflect the time and place, or history, of their cultures, “the unfolding of object and the elaboration of categories are connected” (p. 16). Sherman Alexie's short stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven could not have been written during any other period of history. The twenty-two short tales read like a casebook of postmodernist theory—beyond surrealism and absurdity, and certainly beyond classicism. Irony, pastiche, and mingling of popular cultures occur throughout the book.

David Lehman gives one of the most succinct definitions of the cultural event called postmodernism in the...