Reservation Blues - Reader Response

Reservation Blues

     Sherman Alexie's novel, Reservation Blues, tells a story about a group of Indians that form a rock band and travel from tavern to concert, dealing with their past, present, and future along the way. Through the characters and the conflicts in the story, the reader is offered a glimpse into the troubled life Indians live within reservations and the doubts which plague them because of their skin tone and heritage as well as the beauty they find in life through the perspectives they develop.

      I will be analyzing a quote that appears on page 112.

I don't mean to say it's all your fault, mother-and-father said. But it is all your fault.

     The context for this quote is that Junior is having a nightmare where he sits inside a car with his two brothers and two sisters, waiting for his parents to come back from the tavern where they went dancing. His brothers and sisters confess their hunger and their boredom, and they leave the car and meet their demise through drugs, loneliness, war, and suicide. Junior's parents return, and they scold him by uttering the quote above.

   This quote crushed me. The first time I read this quote, I was deeply saddened by the events leading up to it. Junior narrates his inability to appease his brothers and sisters and cries as they leave the car. It was evident that in his dream he had reverted to his childhood persona as crying was his only response to the situation and is inconsistent with the character built throughout the story, but the themes he had to deal with were far too complex for the mind of a child to cope with. 

   Junior blames himself and struggles with his inability to have prevented the tragic fate his family followed. He remembers them fondly, even if he is unable to recall their names, as he muses about his mother and father loving each other and makes a point to share the Pepsi and chips evenly with his siblings. His guilt is evident through the blame given to him through his dream mom-and-dad's scolding and threats. Junior finds himself unable to argue against this blame and instead opts for crying and curling up into a ball to deal with the matter.

   The second time I read this quote I was struck by the depth it sustained. The quote carries a theme that is present throughout the novel: the situation Indians find themselves in is not completely their fault; their dysfunctional society is the product of poor governmental management, a lack of education, and a whole slew of other factors that the Indians can't necessarily control, and yet they blame one another constantly for the situation they are in. Alcoholics are tolerated by Indian society but scorned by the thinkers within Thomas' group. People that try to find their niche, their calling, like Thomas and his band, are criticized by the Indian community. Even when a few people decide that they want to escape the situation they find themselves in, society still decides to reject them and reproach them. It's not their fault that life on the reservation is so tough and that music is one of the few ways they can escape the mediocrity of their lives and yet people still choose to hate on them.