81 pages • 2 hours read
Sherman AlexieFlight: A Novel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
An alarm clock beeps and awakens Zits. He’s in a strange room, which is unsurprising—he’s always in strange rooms. He knows that he didn’t set the alarm clock because, if he had, it would’ve played music that he likes—Kanye West, the White Stripes, or even music from his dead mother’s favorite band, Blood, Sweat & Tears. He recalls her serenading him with her favorite of their songs, “I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know.” He was just an infant then, but he believes that he remembers this. He also believes that he remembers his conception. He recalls his “mother and father slow-dancing to that Blood, Sweat & Tears song,” and his father singing it to his mother in a whisper (10). Zits believes that he was conceived because of that song.
He decides to stop thinking about his parents and focuses on where he is—in yet another foster home. He looks in the mirror and counts all of the pimples on his face: 47.
He remembers nothing about his father, but knows that he was an Indian “[f]rom this or that tribe” and “[f]rom this or that reservation” (11). His father was a drunk who abandoned him, and Zits’ mother, who was Irish, died when he was six. He wishes that she had died sooner, so that he wouldn’t remember her voice, her beauty, and her green eyes.
Since she died, he’s lived in “twenty different foster homes” and has encountered numerous unhelpful social worker—including one who told him that he “had never developed a sense of citizenship” (12). Zits learned to fit his “entire life…into one small backpack” (14). He runs away from his foster homes and back toward a group of alcoholic “street Indians” (14). He’s proud of the fact that he can outdrink all of them and is a good enough beggar to make enough to buy alcohol for the entire group. He also shoplifts to get what he needs. Less adept at this than his drinking, he always gets caught by the police and sent to juvenile jail.
Zits realizes that though he's been in their house for two days, he cannot remember the names of the members of his new foster family. Most of the time, he’s placed with white families. He recalls once being placed with a Native American foster father named Edgar, who gave him a remote-controlled airplane—“an F-15 fighter jet” (15). Irritated after Zits beat him in a race of their jets, Edgar took Zits’ remote control and crashed the plane. Zits reminds Edgar that he inadvertently crashed his own plane, because they had switched their jets earlier. Unfazed, Edgar then “flew the other plane into a tree” (16).
Zits doesn’t want to see his new foster family. He wishes that he had a television in his room. He likes to watch programs that teach him things. He’s learned a lot about Native American history from watching television. He also loves to read, but there aren’t any books in his new room either; he figures there probably aren’t many books in the entire house.
Zits walks downstairs. His new foster mother greets him and offers him “a bowl of cornflakes” (18). Zits says nothing to her, which stirs his foster father to demand that he obey his foster mother’s expectation of politeness. Zits’ only response is “whatever” (18). The other foster children stare at him with their “cold blue eyes” (19). Zits’ foster father, who has “one eyebrow and a thick forehead like a caveman,” demands once more that Zits say “good morning” (19). If he doesn’t, he won’t get any breakfast. Zits expresses indifference. He’s been hungry before. When his foster father says “good morning” once again, Zits replies, “Fuck you” (20).
Chapter 2 Summary
Zits asserts that his pimples bestow him with “superpowers” (22). What he means is that puberty has made him more proficient at defending himself against abuse in his foster homes. He envisions himself running through the city and fighting off cops. But, this vision is real, and one of the cops he fights off is his friend, Officer Dave.
Officer Dave and his partner drive Zits “to kid jail in Seattle’s Central District” (24). The officers place Zits in a holding cell where three other teens—“a black kid and a white kid and a Chinese kid”—are also being detained (24). Zits assesses the other boys and determines that the black teen probably isn’t in a gang and very likely isn’t tough. The Chinese boy’s parents “pick him up and spank him like he was five years old,” while the black teen is “transferred to another cell” (25). Zits is left alone with the white boy, who engages him in conversation. He asks about the poor condition of Zits’ skin, which leads Zits to ask the boy if he’s “some kind of fag” (24). Zits is then struck by the boy’s gaze, which projects overwhelming kindness. They talk briefly about religion. The white kid says that he “[hates] all organized religions and all disorganized ones, too” (27). He insists that hate is “empowering,” then questions Zits about what he thinks it means to be empowered (27). When Zits admits to not knowing, his new friend insists that he can show him.
Chapter 3 Summary
Zits and his cellmate become fast friends. Zits idealizes him, as though he were “Allah or Buddha or LeBron James or any other God” (29). In turn, the white kid expresses admiration for Zits’ indigenous culture, for his pyromania, and for his loner status. They laugh and express affection toward each other. Zits’ new friend is released from the juvenile detention center. Before leaving, he promises that he’ll come to release Zits—no matter where Zits is.
Zits confesses to getting so angry that he has a desire to hurt people. He has a “recurring dream” in which he dismembers a gang of black men then gorges himself on their brains and entrails (30). He doesn’t think, though, that this dream makes him racist. He insists that he hates all people equally. A child psychiatrist tells Zits that he has this dream “because, in American society, black men are the metaphoric embodiment of rage and fear and pain” (31). Zits has no idea what the “kid shrink” is talking about (31). He also dismisses the psychiatrist’s assertion that he has “attachment issues” (31).
Officer Dave visits Zits in his holding cell and warns him that he’s “running out of chances” to turn his life around (31). He tells Zits that he talked the judge into sending him into a halfway house instead of his being given more jail time. Zits, however, detests group homes even more than foster homes, due to past experiences of sexual abuse with counselors and supervisors—“Uncle Creepy types, who try to stick their hands down your pants” (32). He recalls being sent to jail for punching one of them “in the crotch” (32).
One night, while he’s lying awake in the halfway house, Zits hears a knock at his window. It’s his new best friend from jail, who helps Zits escape. He leads Zits to “an abandoned warehouse [in] an industrial section of Seattle down near the waterfront” (32). The white kid is squatting there, in a home that he’s made “out of garbage and abandoned office furniture” (32).
Zits reminds the boy that he doesn’t even know his name. The boy introduces himself with two pistols—one “looks like a regular gun and the other one looks like a Star Wars laser” (32). He points to one of the pistols and identifies it as “a thirty-eight special,” while the other is a paint gun (32). The boy says his name is Justice; he gave himself the name but says that he wishes that Native Americans had.
Zits asks if Justice has ever heard of the Ghost Dance—a “ceremony created by the Paiute holy man Wovoka, back in the eighteen-seventies,” designed to make white people disappear (34). Justice is fascinated, but Zits says that the dance didn’t serve its purpose. Moreover, no one has ghost-danced in more than 100 years, though Zits thinks that for it to be successful, all indigenous people would need to perform it. Justice insists that Zits is strong enough to perform the ritual by himself. Zits thinks that “the only Indian [he wants] to bring back is [his] father and the only white people [he wants] to disappear are [his] evil foster families” (35). He also thinks that Justice doesn’t realize that if this ritual were successful, he, too, would disappear. Then again, maybe Justice thinks that he’s invincible.
The boys get hungry. They rummage through “supermarket dumpsters and restaurant trash cans” (35). They live together for two weeks. They tape up pictures of people they hate—George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Michael Jackson, and Simon Cowell—and practice shooting at them with an unloaded gun. They go up to the roof and practice shooting passersby on the street below. On some nights, they load up the paint gun, jump out of corners, and shoot strangers. One man falls down, has a seizure, and goes unconscious.
Zits begins to wonder what would happen if he killed many people. Justice asks if Zits thinks that the Ghost Dance is real. Zits says that he does. Justice hugs him and asks what he’ll do now that he feels empowered. Zits hugs his friend and says that he’ll “start a fire” (37).
The next day, Zits walks into “the lobby of a bank in downtown Seattle” during lunch hour (37). He will kill everyone in the bank so that he can return his parents. He takes a deep breath, reaches into his pockets, and pulls out both the real gun and the paint gun. He says a prayer to himself and dances through the lobby, aiming his guns at the faces of bystanders. They scream, run away, or freeze in shock. One man points at Zits and tells him that he’s not real. Zits wonders if that’s true. Zits spins around, shooting at people in the bank, until a bank guard shoots him in the back of the head.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
In the first three chapters, Alexie establishes the contradictions that plague Zits’ young life—quotidian family life vs. the instability of living in foster homes, real vs. created memories, and reality vs. fantasy. The ringing of the alarm clock and the gathering of families around tables to eat breakfast are exemplary of the quotidian aspects of life that are supposed to convince Zits that he’s in a stable environment. He recalls details from his childhood—particularly the lingering image of his pretty mother—and connects those memories with things that he may have been told. The title of the Blood, Sweat, and Tears song reconnects him to his mother—the only person who unconditionally loved him and the only adult with whom he felt safe. The song also reinforces his awareness that he was conceived as a result of a loving relationship between his parents, despite his father’s subsequent abandonment of the family. Zits’ commitment to these narratives give him a degree of self-worth and some context.
While the memories of his mother provide him with some comfort—and remind him that he was actually born from someone and is, in fact, real—the memories are also a source of pain. He copes with the pain of his maternal loss by framing himself as surreal—that is, a being with superpowers or, when he enters the bank, as a figment of someone’s imagination.
Mary—introduced at the end of the novel—and his mother are the only women in the novel with whom Zits fosters any connection. Other women appear only as objects of sexual interest or as objects of pity as they are mistreated by men. These views of women who are not maternal figures signal Zits’ burgeoning sexuality as well as his need to feel intimacy with women. Otherwise, when recalling his foster parents, he thinks only of his foster fathers as objects of resentment, much like how he views his biological father. His confrontations with these men are always assertions of independence. He assures himself that he doesn’t need their approval and decides that they are unworthy of his. This partly explains why Zits derides his latest foster father’s appearance by analogizing it to that of a caveman. The blue eyes that Zits observes around the kitchen table imply that the other foster children are all white, which reestablishes his feeling of isolation, even in this home for cast-off children.
On the other hand, Zits’ relationship with a coterie of homeless, alcoholic Native American men is a source of stability; he returns to them every time he runs away from a foster home. He can rely on the immutability of their pitiful circumstances. They also provide him with some connection to his indigenous heritage. Through them, he embraces his sense of being outcast from mainstream American society—both for being indigenous and for being a foster child. He develops what he perceives to be manhood through his connection to them; he prides himself on out-drinking them and feels like a contributor this ersatz family when, throguh begging, he raises sufficient funds for more alcohol.
Though Zits embraces life as a reprobate, he retains some conventional interests in books and educational programming. This tells the reader that he has developed an intellectual curiosity despite the absence of both parental guidance and formal schooling.
Zits goes further in distancing himself from respectability and convention by lauding aspects of his physical being that make him different or, even, presumably ugly. He describes his zits as “superpowers”; they're defenses against a world whose love he has decided to reject before he will ever admit to having a need for it, thereby making himself vulnerable. However, when Justice expresses concern for Zits’ skin, he also demonstrates concern for Zits’ well-being. He notices what Zits has assumed no one notices about him: He is worthy of love and attention. Justice’s promise to resume his relationship with Zits by rescuing him from the halfway house is proof of love through action, which few adults in his life have demonstrated.
Justice’s emphasis on action as a demonstration of empathy contrasts with the adult authority figures in Zits’ life, particularly the child psychiatrist who tries to explain Zits to himself using jargon-laden language. Alexie’s brief introduction of this character satirizes how those whose job it is to help others understand themselves inadvertently create more confusion by failing to clearly and directly communicate. Zits dismisses the psychiatrist as a “kid shrink” to reassert his feeling that this is yet another authority figure who proves to be too incompetent, incoherent, and uncaring to help him. Officer Dave is a foil for such figures, making efforts to show Zits that he isn’t hopeless and can change his life if he wants to.
While Officer Dave tries to ground Zits in efforts to offer real and practical solutions for change, Zits chooses the ghost dance as an instrument of personal and social transformation. The ghost dance symbolizes Zits’ desire to reconnect with both his history and his family—particularly, his secret wish to find his father and uncover the reason for his abandonment. The discussion about the ghost dance also foreshadows Zits’ teleportation through history.
Justice helps Zits reframe the ghost dance as a ritual in which something is destroyed in the interest of reviving something lost, and of starting anew. Zits’ relationship with Justice, whom the reader later learns could be imaginary, initiates Zits’ confusion between reality and fantasy. Shooting someone with a paint gun—a fake attack—may have resulted in a real death. Walking into a bank as a presumed mass shooter results in a bystander denying Zits’ presence. The plausibility of the bystander’s statement exposes Zits’ sense of not having a real notion of self. What one of his counselors previously misidentified as an absence of citizenship (a comment that could be construed as the prejudice that Native Americans exist on the periphery of American society) is really an absence of character. Zits’ subsequent journey through history, both national and personal, helps him grasp who he is and who he wants to be.
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