Indians Diverted Desire in Ten Term Paper

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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. She feels ignored, so resolves not to allow books to go similarly ignored. "What happens to the world when that many books go unread? And what happens to the unread authors of those unread books?" she wonders.

Frank Snake Church of "What Ever Happened to Frank Snake Church," diverts his frustrated desires into basketball. Both Corliss and Church are incapable of expressing love, for a man or for a parental figure, thus they divert their impulses into things and games rather than the actual, potentially hurtful world of desire. Their diverted aims are rooted in a fear of failure, or as one character that nearly becomes the victim of a terrorist attack, muses, "we're all failures." as, even when "carrying the woman," a fellow victim of the terrible bombing, the saver "walked among these sinners, the obese and the vain, the intolerable and the selfish, the liars and thieves, the wasteful and the avaricious. And wasn't he the greatest sinner? Wasn't he more dangerous to the people who loved him than any terrorist could ever be? Forgive me, God, oh, forgive me, he thought as he carried this other exploded woman.

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If he could save her, he hoped he might be saved." By saving a woman, he man hopes to save his own sexuality, his own desire and drive to live and to achieve something higher. The short story's title "Can I get a Witness?" suggests the need, religious, cultural, and sexual for a connection with another person, a witness in the religious and judicial sense to one's own humanity.

Thus, in Sherman Alexie's book Ten Little Indians, the author's use of sexual references always serve a purpose -- they show the dangers of desire, and the risks of displacement of sexual desires into other objects. They show how sexuality can be diverted into the language of humor, or the use of crass language and even of violence and gambling. Desire is dangerous for the marginalized, because the true object of a true desire when thwarted can never be redeemed, like the Indian past of "What you Pawn, I will Redeem." Jackson squanders money and life away, because if he did gain an object of desire, whether the pretty cashier or his grandmother's old robe, he is afraid he would not be worthy of these objects, that he would fail as a man as he has failed in so many other things in his life.

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