The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven: Family Portrait Summary & Analysis

An unnamed narrator recalls his childhood; the first thing he remembers is that “the television was always too loud.” He mishears the words he can hear coming out of it, and the TV’s overwhelming, ever-present volume “distort[s and] fragment[s]” his own family’s conversations.

The narrator is unnerved by the quick passage of time and the dissolution of his memories, able to remember little but the television. He has one memory of a time “the reservation disappeared” during a game of playing pretend with this brother and sisters. His father, he remembers, stumbled drunk off the bottom step of the porch and “came back years later with diabetes and a pocketful of quarters.”

The narrator and his brother have a shared memory of all of their siblings combining the scraps that dropped off their plates during dinner and then “scrap[ing] the food into their open mouths.” Their parents and sisters to this day insist that the memory is false, but the narrator and his brother “cannot deny the truth of [their] story.”

The narrator was ill as a child, and his family tells him stories of his seizures, during which his mother “wanted to believe” he was able to have visions of the future. The narrator recalls dancing to music frequently with his siblings and parents, “fighting waking nightmares” only to fall asleep into horrible dreams.

The narrator remembers “the summer of sniffing gas,” when he and his brother and sisters inhaled fumes from their family’s lawnmower and idle BIA vehicles. The narrator wonders “how much we remember of what hurts us most,” and wonders how a glimpse of bright sunlight might have distorted their family’s portrait—how it might have changed how they posed for the photograph.

The narrator remembers his father teaching him how to drive while describing the story of “the first television he ever saw,” and how he and his friends would walk again and again to the store window where it was perched just to stare at it. The narrator then remembers his own family’s television, its volume, and how “every emotion was measured by the half hour.” He describes his brother and sisters and parents as “open mouths,” and recalls that all they wanted was “to survive.”