The Trickster Adventures In Flight:Zits' Consciousness Awakening And The Construction Of His Cultural Identity

Sherman Alexie is one of the most notable writers of modern Native American Literature,and the protagonists in his works are mostly Indian adolescents.Flight is a novel Alexie released in 2007,which tells a story about the growth of a young Irish-Indian child Zits.After losing his parents at a very young age,Zits spends most of his years in and out of different foster families from which he does not receive love or care.To get attention from other people,he is engaged in some invidious deeds like stealing and fighting,and he is even induced to shoot people in the lobby of a bank after he meets a white boy named Justice.This atrocious action triggers off a series of fantastic adventures in which Zits inhabits the bodies of five different people.By experiencing different lives,Zits' consciousness of the orderly society is awakened and his cultural identity is established.This thesis explores the resemblance between the protagonist Zits and the archetypal figure of trickster.In mythology and folklore,a trickster is often depicted as a citizen of contingencies and a patron of boundaries.He is both subhuman and superhuman,behaving unconsciously like human-beings in their mental darkness,but at the same time possessing super powers like shape-shifting.Like a traditional trickster,Zits in Flight is also paradoxically personified.He has a subhuman side which is presented as his unconsciousness of his existence in an orderly society,and such unconsciousness leads to his breaking rules,behaving invidiously and atrociously,and bringing chaos to others.However,at the same time,he is superhuman.He has the super power to inhabit the bodies of other people to experience their lives.Moreover,Zits is also a boundary-crosser,because he wanders between different foster families and crosses the boundary between Indian and white cultures.The subhuman and superhuman characteristics of Zits and his wandering nature make him more a trickster than an ordinary teenager.The trickster adventures present a learning process from unconsciousness toconsciousness,during which a trickster often perfects himself in wisdom and morality.Alexie molds Zits as a trickster whose consciousness awakening and construction of cultural identity are also achieved through a series of adventures.On the one hand,during the trickster adventures of experiencing violence,betrayal and love,Zits learns how to get along with others,how to differentiate right from wrong and how to behave himself in an orderly society.On the other,the trickster adventures are the objectification of the Third Space which is opened up by Zits' hybridity of white culture and Indian culture.During the adventures,Zits transforms his identity form white to Indian and then from Indian to white.The transformations make Zits realize that his cultural identity is not fixed,but in an on-going and fluid negotiation.He does not need to merge into or cut off from mainstream society,but can construct a hybrid cultural identity.