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Sherman Alexie's Big Lies, Small Lie

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Germany ascertains a certain degree of dishonor for being the origin of mass destruction and hosting the home of Hitler. To which, in the beginning of its dark past, Dachau is the founding image for all concentration camps throughout Europe for the time. This is where men trained to fight and all other persons who didn’t fit the profile were sent during the war. In Sherman Alexie’s poem “Big lies, small lies,” one takes a figurative tour throughout the country and its dark past, which juxtaposes with the level of dishonor in America.

The poem titled as “Big lies, small lies,” opens with, “Having lied to our German hosts,” one can understand how daily life anywhere contains lies. Yet the lies are deeper as cities call out to search for the truth about an area. Munich is “only a short train ride away from Dachau,” which if one can speak a little German then it’s simple to travel the city. By “lying” to the hosts of the trip, Alexie escapes the “normal society” and view the …show more content…

Hence, in the poem, Germans ask Americans “what about all the Dachausin the United States” for they “are truly ashamed of Dachau” and there seems to be no “Dachausins” in America. For the poem’s entire message is to show this idea and connecting to the poem’s title, one can understand how America may seem to have superficial lies as opposed to Germany in the last one hundred years, but America has much deeper lies. The “Dachausins” in America are the mass graves from Wounded knee and Sand-Creek as a result of entire villages of indigenous people being erased by wars and mistreatments. It can almost be said that Dachau based its image from America’s bigger lies. To which, both countries lie, but America through Alexie’s perspective has bigger hidden lies which are being fed alcohol in order to finish the job started 200 years

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