Sherman Alexie and Abel in N. Scott Momaday

He is really playacting out his personal alienation and labeling it as championing the rights of his people, but there is irony in this as well because Smith has no "people." He has no tribe, no grounding in his culture, no background to anchor him, and no relationship with his own heritage beyond what he can create in his mind. He is not alone in this regard, though, for gentlemany of those he meets on the streets are also lost souls with more(prenominal) ties to the Native American culture in their minds than in reality. They are just as angry as he is and just as inefficacious in channeling it in a positive direction. One of those who is most as ineffective is Marie Polatkin, and another is Jack Wilson, the popular novelist who tries to act his small share of Indian blood while notwithstanding angering the full-blooded Indians around him.

Momaday's novel is set in 1945 at the end of World War II, and the Tano Indian Abel returns to his home closure in New Mexico. He has grown considerably during his quantify in the service, so he returns a different man from the younger boy who left. His alienation develops as he finds himself betwixt two mankinds, between the world he once cute and believed was paramount, the world of his grandfathers, and the white world he served in the soldiers and which now tempts him when he is back in civilian carriage. The world of his grandfath

er, Francisco, is the world of the buck, and ties to the land turn in meaning in life, while separation from the land leads to alienation. The land is both harsh and beautiful, but the people are sad and have few prospects for changing that situation.

Abel is tempted by the abundance seen in white America after the war, and so he is set about with the choice of remaining with his people, remaining with the land they have busy for thousands of years, or leaving to seek his fortune in a white society he also does not fully understand and into which he does not fit. Abel fails because his attempt to make the intonation places him more completely between the two world, belonging to neither, and so having no ties to support him. He ends up first in prison, then in Los Angeles where he falls into a life of despair, dissipation, and alienation.

Abel never manages to link his life to either of the two worlds dedicate before him, not to the white culture he musical theme wold make him wealthy, and not to the land his ancestors have long engaged and the culture they have lived there. What happens to Abel is not that different from what happens to thousands of other immanent Americans who might prefer to live in a more traditional culture but who also must appear the fact that their stat
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