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.
Themes
Violence, Revenge, and Justice
Alexie explores how Zits’ frustration with his condition leads him to embrace violence as a viable method to vindicate himself against a world that has hurt him. He has learned from popular American culture that violence is the most effective means of gaining respect and is deemed a legitimate way for men to express themselves. Art demands that Hank establish his loyalty by shooting Junior’s corpse. The elder Native American warrior demands that his ambivalent son kill the young soldier who destroyed his voice. Gus, who initially set out to find an Indian camp with the intent of killing its occupants in revenge for murdering whites, decides to turn against his fellow troops to protect Small Saint and Bow Boy. In this latter instance, Zits’ own sensibility takes over, forcing the body of Augustus Sullivan to correct a pattern of injustice against Zits’ people.
In each of his teleportations, there are violent confrontations. Zits, occupying different bodies throughout time, is forced to make moral choices, which help him realize that he is not as inured to violence as he believed. His formation of a relationship with Justice, whether real or imaginary, was a first attempt at self-love. It also reveals that, contrary to his posture of indifference, Zits sees himself as someone deserving of love and companionship—an assertion that is a means of gaining justice against those who have hurt and abused him. His eventual acceptance of Mary’s love is a form of resolution, quelling his seemingly bottomless need for revenge and dissuading him from wanting to inflict further violence against himself or others.
Family: The Desire for Love and Stability
The primary source of Zits’ pain is his experience of never belonging to a loving, stable family. His father abandoned him shortly after his birth and his mother died when he was six. His memories of her are steeped in the sorrow from her loss and his longing for maternal love. He believes that he’ll never satisfy this longing, until he meets Mary at the close of the book.
Despite Zits’ feelings of racial marginalization, the people who offer him a sense of family and belonging are white. His experience with Edgar, a Native American foster father who proved to be petty and spiteful, dashed his initial hope of having a parental figure who shared his indigenous heritage. Zits likely believed that Edgar could serve as a stand-in for his biological father. However, his only opportunity to belong to an indigenous family occurs when he enters the body of the young warrior. In the context of this experience, he feels what it might have been like to be a member of a tribe, and to be a member of a family within a tribe. Zits’ experience of walking back to the family tepee with his warrior father is one of the novel’s tenderest moments, and one in which Zits’ mask of aloofness briefly falls, revealing his loneliness.
Ancestry and Identity
Zits’ lack of a family gives him the feeling that he lacks context. He knows from his appearance and from photographs of his parents that he is of Irish and Native American ancestries, but he has no personal connection to either of these identities. All that Zits knows about his indigenous ancestry is what he has learned from educational programming. His attempts to connect with other indigenous people result in failure, like in the case of Edgar; or, they are attempts to connect with inappropriate types, such as the group of homeless alcoholics whom he returns to each time he runs away from a foster home.
When he enters Augustus “Gus” Sullivan’s body, this is an opportunity for Zits to connect with his Irish identity. Though Zits never expresses any awareness of discrimination against the Irish in 19th century America, Gus’ change of heart—that is, his refusal to destroy a Native American tribe to declare his allegiance to white supremacy—is a choice to express empathy and moral righteousness over usurping racial privilege. These experiences help Zits understand the complexity of racial identity and that one’s sense of belonging isn’t always determined by ancestry.
Related Titles
By Sherman Alexie
