"Ten Little Indians"

Paper Summary:

This paper examines the short story collection, "Ten Little Indians," by Sherman Alexie, in which the guests are mysteriously eliminated, one by one, in bloody and ingenious fashions. It looks at how Sherman Alexie's tales attempt to eliminate stereotypes about Indians, one by one, and how, in this collection of short stories, which itself is ironic in its structure because it contains nine rather than ten stories of thwarted individuals, sex, and sexuality that is always displaced rather than directed towards its original object of desire.

From the Paper:

"Desire, and feeling passion in a world where desire only seems to lead to futility, because the society denies the identity of even the most successful Indian, causes Indian people to divert their desires into other, often ineffective ways. Jackson Jackson turns to gambling and drink, his uncle to murder. The scholarly heroine of the library set tale, entitled "The Search Engine," turns to books and literature, for the "huge number of books confirmed how much magic she'd been denied for most of her life, and now she hungrily wanted to read every book on every shelf. An impossible task, to be sure, Herculean in its exaggeration, but Corliss wanted to read herself to death," in a fashion that suggests this spinster has diverted her sexual desires into words and literature with a ferocious appetite."

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