Humorous Names in Sherman Alexie’s Smoke Signals

In The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven Sherman Alexie uses names for ethnic identification, character development, plot development, and most of all humor, irony, and amusement.

Samuel Builds-the-Fire was the father of Samuel Builds-the-Fire, Jr., who was the father of Thomas Builds-the-Fire. All three of them had the gift of storytelling. Samuel could win bets by telling stories about nearby random objects.

Junior Polatkin and Lynn Casey kissed each other. “Junior had never kissed a white woman before and he used his tongue a lot, reached for every part of her mouth, and tried to find out if she tasted different.” ‘Irish,’ Lynn broke the kiss and said, as if she read Junior’s mind. ‘I’m Irish.’”

Noa Chirapkin is the only Skin (reservation indian) Victor knows who has traveled off the reservation. He told Victor he rode off for days and days, “but there were no cars moving, no planes, no bulldozers, no trees.” Once the Others took Noah Chirapkin, tied him down to the ground, poured water down his throat until he drowned.

“Lester FallsApart passed out on top of the stove and somebody turned the burners on high.” “James Many Horses sat in the corner and told so many bad jokes that three or four indians threw him out the door into the snow.” “James didn’t spend very much time alone in the snow. Soon Seymour and Lester were there , too. Seymour was thrown out because he kepf flirting with all the women. Lester was there to cool off his burns.”

Near Christmas, Rosemary Morning Dove gave birth to a boy. Rosemary said she was a virgin, but Frank Many Horses said it was his. “Rosemary MorningDove named him ___ which is unpronounceable in Indian and English but it means: ‘He Who Crawls Silently Through the Grass with a Small Bow and One Bad Arrow Hunting for Enough Deer to Feed the Whole Tribe.’” “We just called him James.”

When Simon liked Jimmy One-Horse, he called him “Jimmy Sixteen-and-One-Half-Horses.” When he didn’t like him, he called him “little Jimmy Zero-Horses.” Jimmy had a tumor. The X-rays showed that it was the size of a baseball, “shaped like one, too. Even had stitch marks.”

Victor is telling about a basketball game in which his team had come from sixteen points down in the fourth quarter, and Victor was fouled. Both of his free throws clanged off the rim. Before that time, he was a 90 % free-throw shooter. After that night he was a 50 % free-throw shooter. He was a victim of what he called “Post-Traumatic Free-Throw Stress Syndrome.”