Compare Contrast Critical Short between Flight Patterns and Search Engine.
Sherman Alexie, author of the short stories Flight Patterns and Search Engine integrates an aesthetically presentable writing style with a sociopolitical agenda. Both stories employ a lyrical style to explore individual characters in different social locations. Both protagonists are Native Americans living in dominantly Anglo communities while maintaining their individual cultures by integrating them into American popular culture. While traditional ideals may be considered compromised, they are ultimately merged into what results as a new culture. .
Poetry is in this story Alexie's metaphor for racial boundary, for something that Anglos have and Native Americans cannot participate in. Search Engine is a tale about a woman caught between two cultures, somewhere between what is traditional and what is new and individual. Her story describes the Native American ambivalence towards western education, an institution that has been both beneficial and malevolent in their progress. As a Native American college student, the character Corliss is already viewed as having defied a powerful racial boundary and through her involvement in poetry she has transgressed another. Poetry is seen as a white refuge and when Corliss adopts it as her own she is personally responsible for a seemingly minor act of culture diffusion. She transfers her subjectivity into the texts she reads and interprets them with her social location in mind. Her race is not a handicap but only part of who she is. Her interest in a practice that is not seen as one that multiethnic and multinational groups contribute to or participate in is Alexie's illustration of racial and cultural difference. "What kind of Indian loses her mind over a book of poems? She was that kind of Indian, she was exactly that kind of Indian, and it was the only kind of Indian she knew how to be.
