Abstract
This thesis sets out to interpret Sherman Alexie’s "Indian Killer", "Reservation Blues" and "Flight" in the context of the theory of deconstruction and post-colonial theory. I use the theory of Jacques Derrida and Homi K. Bhabha. From Derrida I have chosen the concept of "différance", as a way of portraying the effects of reading produced through traces and textual constructions of ambiguity, ambivalence and dissemination. The latter have a major impact on the interpretation of the novels and on how Native American identities are read. From Homi K. Bhabha, I have chosen the concept of "hybridization" and "Third Space" as tropes that help me identify the ways in which Sherman Alexie deconstructs the representation of Native American identities in narrative. In my attempt to define Alexie’s deconstructive project, I first trace out the ways in which he differentiates himself from other Native American authors. Brigitte Georgi-Findlay has included Sherman Alexie as participating in defining some of the new directions in the Native American novel (Georgi-Findlay, 92). The way he complicates and reinvents Indianness is one of the ways I use to show that representations of the Native American are no longer simplistic and more importantly, no longer static. A second aim for this thesis is to consider the implications of some of the representations the novels trace out. Will these enable the subject in formation as represented through the theme of emerging hybridity as survival? Is survival a result of having transformed discursive impediments into possibilities, through reading moments of textual anxiety and ambivalence? If everything is a text, will deconstructing the norms of Indianness allow for the hybridization and deferral of identity Alexie debates through his characters?