Smoke Signals By Sherman Alexie Sparknotes

The Movie Smoke Signals is a story about American Indians. The story is about two teen age boys. At first the Story take place in Coeur D'Alene Indian Reservation in Plummer, Idaho. One of the boys name is Tomas Builds-the-Fire, and the other boys name is Victor Joseph. They were both raised by Victor's father Arnold Joseph. Arnold rescued Thomas as an infant from a house fire that killed Thomas’s parents. Thomas and Victor was neighbors and acquaintances. When victor was at a young age his father left his family and leave the reservation. After few years Victor's mother Arlene hears an unsettling news that Arnold had passed away in Phoenix, Arizona. As result, Thomas and victor go on an adventure to retrieve his ashes. The rest of the story take place in the journey and in Phoenix. In this journey they learn about themselves and each other. Farther more, they learn who Arnold is and how they see him as. Thomas and Victor has different way of thinking and dealing with problems; however, their lives always intertwined by many factors and by Arnold Joseph.

Thomas Builds-the Fire values his Native American culture by being a spiritual person. He has prophetic vision and dreams of the future. Thomas Builds-the-Fire tells Victor stories about his father on the trip to Phoenix, Arizona. One of Thomas vision is he predict that Victor father’s going to leave before anyone knew what was going to happen. “Your father’s heart is weak. He is afraid of his own family. He is afraid of you. Late at night he sits in the dark. Watches the television until there’s nothing but that white noise. Sometimes he feels like he wants to buy a motorcycle and ride away. He wants to run and hide. He doesn’t want to be

Smoke Signals cannot refer to anything else, but the American Indians. While reading it, the often depicted picture comes alive about a stereotyped indigenous person as sending smoke signals to another person; but then, while watching the film, it turns out that this stereotypical image of them are far from it. In this case, smoke signals refer to the fact, that the film is about American Indian characters, but the viewer should decode what the signal means for them, as it hides different meanings for everybody. This is what makes the story more exciting, the journey helps us find ourselves with the help of Victor, who wants to separate from everything that connects him to his roots at the beginning of the story partly due to his relationship with his father that was not the expected good father- son relationship with good

Smoke Signals, written by Sherman Alexie, is a story that is based on his short story “This it was it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona”. (citation) It takes place on the Couer d’Alene Indian Reservation in Idaho (citation). The story focuses on two main characters, Victor and Thomas, and it is based on an event that took place way back in the day, a house fire. No one really knows anything about it, so some other events take place, which leads Victor and Thomas to finding out some details that will eventually unfold things from their past. While watching the movie Smoke Signals after reading the short story, I noticed that it allows us to have a better understanding of what the author is trying to portray about the characters’ pasts. Through the use of flashbacks and storytelling, we are able to unfold some of the mysteries that the short story may have confused us about and we can see some of the major differences that occurred throughout the movie and the short story.

The humor in Smoke Signals begins when the two young men set off on a road trip to pick up Arnold Joseph’s ashes. An important scene in the film is when Victor and Thomas ask two women on the reservation for a ride. Their playful, humorous nature immediately puts the young men at ease. This is one of the first opportunities where we get to see Thomas’ storytelling abilities and the value he places on them, but also begin to question their truthfulness. The women say they’ll consider giving the boys a ride but first need to hear a story. Thomas, without hesitation, shares a story of Victor’s father, Arnold Joseph, being arrested for protesting against the Vietnam War. He plea bargained, and was ultimately charged with “being an Indian in the twentieth century.” When Victor asks the women what they think, one of the women says, “I think it is a fine example of the oral tradition.” This scene also demonstrates a form of barter used in Native

The loyalty Thomas portrays to looking after Victor is towards a promise made to Victor's father. Two years after making the promise, at the age fifteen, "… Victor and Thomas got into a fistfight, " after Victor got drunk which, "The beating might of have gone on until Thomas was dead..." (Alexie 281). By taking the abuse Thomas follows Victor's father wishes to look after his son by taking Victor's aggression because his existence was least

In the movie Smoke Signals by Sherman Alexie; one of the main characters is Thomas Builds-the-fire. It all begins around three in the morning when his parents held the biggest house barbecue for the entire world to see. Thomas Builds-the-fire, he is the child of fire and ashes. Nevertheless, he never had the opportunity to meet his parents from then on. In addition, he lives, talks, and acts like his grandma. Thomas Builds-the-fire has a strong soul and the potential to give hands when needed.

The movie “Smoke Signals” depicts a journey in both the literal and metaphorical sense of the word. The story is of two Native American teens who are on a road trip from their reservation to Phoenix Arizona. After the character Victor hears about the death of his father Arnold, he decides to take the trip to pick up his father’s ashes to bring him “home”. Unfortunately, Victor doesn’t have the financial backing to support this trip, so he is unsure what to do. Luckily, he knew Thomas who was willing to help him financially, only if he as well could go on the trip. These two young men knew one another in result of Victor’s father Arnold who had caused a fire due to his drinking and misuse of fireworks during a celebration of American

The movie has many additional conflicts that help to keep the viewer engaged. For instance, the movie uses the house fire as a way to build Victor’s father’s characterization. They show Victor’s father leaping to save Thomas. This showed the viewer the heroic side of Victor’s father. Later in the movie, the viewer is shown the darker side of Victor’s father. The film depicts him as an abusive and drunk father. It even goes on to tell the viewer how he started the house fire. The short story version left all this detail out. As a result, the relationship between Victor and his father was not as clear as it was in the movie. The film also included a car crash, whereas the short story did not. This car crash was vital in helping to show Victor’s transformation as a character. The crash put Victor in a similar position as his father. He was potentially responsible for harming someone and just like his father, Victor ran for help and took action to save those he harmed. This event is what caused Victor to come to respect and forgive his father. It also led to him treating Thomas better. The short story form missed out on all of that extra detail. In fact, the short story focused more on Victor and Thomas’s relationship than the one between Victor and his father. The short story used various memories and stories about the past to describe their relationship and help them fix it. Granted, the movie also used memories to describe relationships, but not to the same

In Smoke Signals directed by Chris Eyer, the journey that Victor had taken to Phoenix, Arizona seemed like a simple task to achieve, but then realizes how his anger for his father is unworthy, and learns to accept what had happened in the past. In the beginning, Victor learns that his father has passed away in Phoenix, all he feels is hatred, but agrees to go there, just to attain the truck. As he leaves the convenient store to cash a check, he returns home to get ready for his trip, but then has flashbacks of childhood memories he had with his father. It wasn’t the greatest memory, his father was a drunk and beat him for the simplest mistakes he made. As the scene goes on, you notice that he has a snobby attitude and doesn’t want anything

Most of the time Victor would reply shut up Thomas but at the end of the film Victor has a different answer. Thomas asked Victor ”Hey Victor, do you know why your dad really left?” and instead of lashing out at his Victor replied “Yeah. He didn't mean to Thomas.” When Victor confesses to Thomas that he knows what his father did is the most significant moment in the film and where Victor accepts the fact that he is angry and is transformed to a pillar of ash.

Overcoming your past is something big in Smoke Signals and how certain characters achieve this. Victor has a lot going on inside that he will not let come up to the surface for him to deal with. Inside Victor feels responsible for his father leaving. We see this in the flashback scene right after his father left and Thomas ask him about it and if he left because he hated him. Victor proceeds to beat Thomas up and then run away because he believes that he is the reason why his father left, but he doesn’t want to face it. Victor thinks of his dad as a very bad person, one that was drunk all of the time, beat him and his mom, and then left them. By the end of the film he may have then come to realize that he wasn’t the reason his father left and

Dictionary of Narratology). Because if we identify the character of Victor start from his happy childhood, university environment, but since he created the human-like, the complexity of his life getting worse and worse. He tried to struggle and beated down the monster to reconcile his mistake, and went back to his hometown to safe his family but ironically he couldn’t.

Throughout life, all people experience being lost and often, it is because of a relationship that one is enabled to find their way once more. In the film Smoke Signals, the director Chris Eyre captures just how essential one relationship can be through the building of a friendship between characters Victor and Thomas. At the beginning of the film, the past between these characters is shown. It includes a terrible fire from which Thomas is saved by Victor’s father, the abandonment of Victor by his father, and the unsuspected death of Victor’s father. These past experiences cause tension to grow between Thomas and Victor, however, an adventure between them dissolves the anger and replaces it with respect. The first indicator of this relationship

"This book made me cry while reading it in the subway, and I was depressed for a good time after finishing. I'm excited for the upcoming HBO series even though I don't have HBO... maybe I can invest in it just for the week the feature is on?