Themes In Reservation Blues

Introduction
Young people living in the rural areas all over the world share similar dreams as their urban counterparts, swayed by the images transmitted by the television network and the lyrics of rock and roll music. But, the psychological perspective of an individual being born as a Native American is forced to undergo the chaos and commotions in the quest of finding a place for themselves.
Sherman Alexie’s first novel Reservation Blues (1995) centres on the American Dream and the price of success. Written in vivid narrative using chiselled characters, Reservation Blues explores the life of the Native Americans who seek to recover the consequences of the colonisation and forge their lost identity in their own society. A critically acclaimed

He creatively fuses narratives, newspaper excerpts, songs, journal entries, visions, radio interviews, and dreams to explore the lifestyle of Indians, who are primarily individuals, and secondarily members of an ethnic group, which constitute the whole. The novel explores the ways gender roles are represented, the role of religion and faith, the effects of the church on traditional people, pop culture and mass media, tribal history and traditions, the place for music in a tribal community, humanity’s plight of normality, the ways dreams and hopes direct the members of a tribe, the portrayal of white culture in both positive and negative light on an Indian reservation, racial oppression, familial relationships, the nature of magical realism and the differences between reservations and urban Indians. He also mentions about cultural assimilation on the relationships between Indian women and Indian men on the reservation. Alexie does not fall short to spread the soul of the reservation throughout the

Identity struggles are considered to be more social than individualistic, because identifying one’s self ultimately reflects their own history, culture and tradition, and projects their community to the outer world. Sense of one’s own land, being an individual as well as a member of the tribe at the same time, the communal discriminations and the portrayal of the white culture are the essential factors which determine a person’s self-identity. As different social interactions can alter self identities, individual perception of themselves change the social interactions. This is the goal of Stryker’s theory of structural symbolic interactionism. There are two focal points in this theory; the first one posits the self in an interacting social space and the space becomes a reason for the individual’s behaviour towards the society; whereas the latter one is where the individual’s internal thought processes affect the