Tanja Dromnes

Storytelling - in Our Minds and in the Classroom: a Narratological and Didactic Analysis of Sherman Alexie's the Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven Tanja Dromnes

Sherman Alexie is a modern mythmaker; he is a storyteller with a firm belief in the power of storytelling. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is a collection that explores the nature of relationships between people and these characters' struggle to find an autonomous modern identity. By studying literature and the structures in literature, new understandings of how we view life and ourselves may emerge and therefore literature needs to be given a significantly larger space in second language teaching than what has been the tradition in Norwegian schools. This analysis briefly presents the leading theories on the field of narratology. It also explains how narratology can be didactic, and how information and knowledge can be presented as a narrative. Alexie is a writer who explores his life experience as a Native American and who has taken on a similar role of a storyteller and trickster employed in his fiction as a means to survive reservation life through exaggeration and humor, mirroring the Native American storytelling tradition. My goal is to offer a narratological approach to his work which connects narratives with reality through a coherent line called didactic.