Andrew Moulton

December 21, 2014

LIT 315 20th Century American Literature
Southern New Hampshire University
Jamie Marchant
Literary Analysis Paper: Sherman Alexies What You Pawn I Will Redeem

In an effort to represent the Native American Indian race in the contemporary era, Sherman
Alexie uses a stylized conversational tone reminiscent of storytelling to define the importance of
storytelling, secrets, and magic in his cultural heritage. Stories are vitally important to
representing the beliefs and cultural heritage of Native American Indians, and in Sherman
Alexies short story What You Pawn I Will Redeem his writers voice, as well as his many
vignettes, are presented as humorous, engaging, brutal, and honest as these are characteristics
that mark Native American Indian storytelling.
My grandfather just strolled into the house. Hed been there a thousand times. And his
brother and his girlfriend were drunk and beating on each other. And my grandfather stepped
between them And for some reason my great-uncle reached down, pulled my
grandfathers pistol out of the holster, and shot him in the head.
While this vignette doesnt demonstrate any of the humor that many of the other vignettes rely
upon, this one is exemplary for being engaging and brutal, and because Alexies protagonist
Jackson understands that he has a receptive audience in Officer Williams, it is honest. The tone is
conversational; three out of the five sentences start with the preposition and, and all of the
sentences are relatively simple constructions, suggestive of a storytellers diction and pacing.
This particular vignette details the paradox of being held for a crime that one cannot
comprehend. Jacksons great-uncle killed his brother. He is jailed forever, and even attempting to

purge his soul with the therapeutic process of composing fifty-page manuscripts, the great-uncle
is unable to resolve his actions with the outside world. This mirrors the Native American
Indians plight in society. While they did not commit murder, they have been held in a marginal
position in American society for centuries for seemingly incomprehensible reasons.
The vignettes that Alexie presents are not glamorous, they paint a portrait of the beliefs, values,
and cultural heritage that Alexie would like to see cultivated in the Native American Indian race
in the twenty-first century, positive attributes such as humor and strength, but Alexie also
presents the negative attributes of hopelessness and self-harm in an effort to be true to his present
cultural reality. We finished off those bottlesone, two, and three. Alexies world is hard.
His characters drink, they vomit, and by about two in the morning, Jackson is bruised and
battered having most likely suffered a broken nose; all of this is in an effort to depict the harsh
reality confronting Native American Indians without a home, all of whom are battling an
overwhelming sense of hopelessness at the loss of their territorial homeland. This is their culture.
These are their stories.
In order to preserve a sense of autonomy within his Indian culture, but also perhaps in order to
create a sense of longing in his readers that mirrors the longing of Native American Indians for
their land, Alexie withholds secrets from the reader. We sang all the ones we could, the elder
Aleut said. The others are just for our people. This exclusivity creates community between
members and a marked feeling of separation from those considered outsiders. In this example
Alexie is even differentiating of the secrecy between cultural Indian groups. He is emphasizing
the respect Indians have for secrecy because they must all rely upon secrets as a way of creating
harmonious and integrated cultural enclaves. In these enclaves, secrets and silence are a form of
strength, but weighing Alexies verbose prose, one should also consider that Alexie is positing a

new and contemporary approach to the preservation of their Indian culture. By voicing the
opinions, frailties, and realities confronting the Native American Indian population, he is, in
effect, garnering attention toward their plight and thus gaining economic and societal stature in
the American publics opinion. I believe that through his writing, Alexie is encouraging his
Indian peers to rely less upon silence and more upon being vocal of their needs in an American
society that demands being vocal, as this would be a way of preserving their shared indigenous
culture.
In a contemporary society rife with external challenges toward solidarity, Alexie offers magic
and spirits as an underlying force supporting the lives of Indians, thereby emphasizing the
spiritual components constructing the psyche of Native American Indians. To the good cop with
a sweet tooth Officer Williams, Jackson verbally commits to believ[ing] in magic, and
throughout the story we see unexplainable magic salvaging the ruined lives of Indians, especially
that of our protagonist Jackson. It is suggested that magic watches out for Indians when they fall
asleep on the train tracks, it is involved in the mysterious emergence-disappearance-emergence
of the pawn shop, and quite possibly, it might play a role in softening the pawn shop keepers
resolve to keep Jacksons grandmothers regalia for the price of one thousand dollars. In the last
scene as Jackson channels his grandmothers spirit and dances in the street, the pedestrians, cars,
and even the city stops. He is not hit by a car, he is not whisked off to the local sanitarium, he is
instead given this moment of grace by the world, by the spirits of his ancestors, who are all
looking out for him and reveling in this small reclamation of identity.
Published in 2003, Sherman Alexies short story What You Pawn I Will Redeem is
contemporary for many reasons. Alexie, an often marginalized voice in the greater American
literary society, uses a stylized tone reminiscent of a storyteller to present the Native American

Indian experience in America. Selecting topics to present in story form that vividly describe the
lives of Native American Indians; he is not glamorizing or overly positive in his critique of his
society, but rather harsh and ironic in his portrayal of the problems beleaguering his people. He
uses a stylistic storytellers voice alongside harshly descriptive vignettes to convey, both to his
Indian peers and to a wider American public, the importance of storytelling in his cultural
heritage. One of the techniques he employs in creating drama and intrigue within in the story is
in withholding information in the form of secrets. These secrets, along with the spiritual
components of an American Indians life, are indicative of the claims made by Native American
Indians toward their autonomous cultural identity. After the loss of his territory, stories, secrets,
and magic are the only aspects left to his culture. He presents these components as integral to the
contemporary American Indian race and claims that as a unified people without a territorial
homeland, he is justified in having an equal and recognized voice in contemporary American
society.

Works Cited
Alexie, Sherman. "What You Pawn I Will Redeem." The New Yorker 21 April 2003. Web. 16 December
2014.