Alexie: Class

Edgar

Alexie's character Edgar Eagle Runner is a Native American from Spokane, Washington, and despite his ethnic background and upbringing, was able to overcome and become a corporate lawyer. Not only is Edgar the protagonist in Alexie's story, but he also represents what many people in America could experience: a cheating wife, revenge, the loss of a child, a loveless marriage, and even a life-changing epiphany. Told in Edgar's point of view, Alexie tells the story of Edgar and Susan, the white woman that he marries, from how they met to the morning after Edgar's bloody bar fight. This shows how Edgar evolves over the relationship. Towards the end of the story, Edgar experiences an epiphany while being intimate with his wife "that she'd been faking her orgasms all along since [their] child had died, and probably since the first time [they] made love," (Alexie, 46). This epiphany causes him to leave his wife in bed and leave the house to a bar and allow himself to get into a fight that he is certainly outmatched in. After this fight, he returns home to his wife in more ways than one. When Edgar answers his wife's question of where he had gone he says "I was gone...But now I am back," (Alexie, 56). This shows that his physical return is also a metaphorical return, that he had not truly been there in the relationship since he discovered her secret affair.

Work Cited:

Alexie, Sherman. "Class." The Toughest Indian in the World. New York: Grove, 2000. 35-56. Print.