The Efficacy of Humor in Sherman Alexie's Flight: Violence, Vulnerability, and the Post-9/11 World

Abstract

Sherman Alexie’s novel Flight (2007) explores the origins, contexts, and consequences of violence and terrorism in the post-9/11 world. Narrated by a fifteen-year-old foster child who calls himself Zits, Flight invites readers into the mind of a disaffected youth who uses both humor and violence to cope with an unjust world. When Zits opens fire in a bank lobby, he becomes unstuck in time— like Kurt Vonnegut’s character Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)—and is transported into the minds of other people also caught in violent circumstances at different historical moments. Alexie uses this body-jumping tactic to widen the social and political framework for understanding the attacks of September 11, 2001, as well as to examine Zits’s personal effort to cope with the violence that threatens to envelop him. Flight juxtaposes individualized and historical parallels to 9/11 in order to challenge simplistic responses to terrorist attacks—responses more likely to escalate than to prevent violence. As in so many of his narratives, Alexie infuses Flight with humor. Zits uses humor in a variety of ways, primarily to protect and define himself in a dangerous world. For Zits, humor serves as a defense strategy against an onslaught of physical, emotional, and rhetorical threats exacerbated by his marginal status as an “unofficial” Indian (he is not tribally enrolled) and his mistreatment within a broken foster care system. In this respect, Alexie conforms to a common treatment of humor by Native American writers: humor as a sign of strength and survival. In Custer Died for Your Sins (1969), for example, Vine Deloria, Jr., argues that humor allows individual and group survival (167). Kenneth Lincoln describes “the ethnic glue of Indi’n humor” (23), asserting that laughter is good for “exorcising the pain, redirecting their suffering, [and] drawing together against the common enemy” (5). Native American humor is often employed to unify resistance to intercultural violence. In Flight, however, Alexie departs from the notion that humor primarily demonstrates solidarity and strength in the face of racism, signaling a significant shift from his previous uses of humor. In a 2006 interview,