Portrayal Of Urban Indian Identity In Sherman Alexie’s “The Search Engine”

Abstract

Alexie has devoted a significant amount of his energy to crafting a precise portrayal of the contemporary Native American experience in the dynamic and evolving metropolitan environment. In Ten Little Indians, Alexie places his characters in a more favourab[1]le position of adapting to their metropolitan environment. Alexie’s characters have discovered a satisfactory balance between the reservation and the metropolis. The Native American identity continuum, characterised by dualistic identities, offers these characters the choice to either assimilate into or resist the mainstream culture. Alexie is actively preserving the Indian heritage he highly values and safeguarding the indigenous discourse’s perception in today’s industrialised society by not assimilating it into the dominant white culture. This form of retrospective cultural preservation serves to forward Alexie’s objective of establishing a completely indigenous, urban literary Indian. This study examines the concept of Urban Indian Identity as shown in Sherman Alexie’s “The Search Engine”. Department of English, St. John's College of Art and Science, Ammandivilai, Kanyakumari, Tamilnadu, India Affiliated to Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Tirunelveli, Tamilnadu, India – 627012.