Novel: Flight

Overview
Sherman Alexie's 2007 novel Flight follows a 15-year-old, mixed-race Native American boy who calls himself Zits as he ricochets through anger, alienation, and a metaphysical journey that reframes his understanding of violence and identity. Orphaned by his mother's death and abandoned by an Irish father he has never met, Zits ricochets through foster homes and detention in Seattle, nursing a rage that feels larger than his life. The book blends gritty realism with time-bending vision to ask what justice means for a kid shaped by historical and personal betrayal.

Story
Picked up yet again for minor crimes, Zits lands in juvenile detention, where he meets Justice, a charismatic, streetwise white kid who sizes up Zits's grievances with uncanny precision. Justice feeds him a rhetoric of retaliation, trains him with paintball guns, and hands him a real one. Fueled by humiliation, loneliness, and Justice’s talk of righteous revenge, Zits walks into a downtown bank intending to make himself infamous. He begins shooting, and then the world tilts.

Instead of carnage, time breaks open. Zits finds himself waking inside other people’s bodies across American history and into the present, forced to live moments where violence, loyalty, and betrayal collide. Each leap suspends the bank in a kind of limbo while he inhabits another life long enough to feel its fear and power from the inside.

Journeys Through History
He first becomes an FBI agent in the 1970s during a standoff with Native activists. Caught between a swaggering partner and desperate militants, he watches informants, ideology, and fear turn people into pawns. The badge confers authority and the temptation to abuse it, but it also demands choices that cost lives.

He then becomes a young Native boy on the Great Plains in the nineteenth century, swept into a cycle of revenge between tribes and settlers. The exhilaration of a raid curdles into horror when retribution reaches women and children. In another leap he is a seasoned Native tracker employed by the U.S. Army, guiding soldiers toward a hidden camp. He sees how survival can be weaponized against kin, and how mercy, choosing to save a single terrified child, can defy orders and history’s momentum.

In the present day, he inhabits a flight instructor whose gifted Middle Eastern student raises uneasy suspicions. The instructor’s guilt and evasions echo through the aftermath of catastrophe, complicating easy stories of innocence and blame. Finally, Zits slips into the body of his own absentee father years before Zits’s birth, inhabiting the man’s alcoholism, homelessness, and traumas. The revelation is not exoneration but context: the father’s abandonment becomes part of a wider chain of damage rather than a simple, solvable wound.

Resolution and Themes
Returned to the frozen moment in the bank, Zits now refuses the script he thought he was writing. He fires into the ceiling rather than at people and surrenders. A police officer named Dave, who had shown him unexpected kindness earlier over a diner breakfast, helps shepherd him out of the spiral. A new foster family offers patience rather than punishment, and Zits, for the first time, risks believing in it. He chooses to stop calling himself Zits and claim his given name, Michael, a small, profound act of self-rescue.

Flight is driven by the question of what it takes to break a cycle, of historical violence against Native peoples, of institutional harm, of family damage, and of a furious teenager’s longing to matter. By forcing its protagonist to inhabit victims, perpetrators, bystanders, and the compromised in-betweens, the novel undermines fantasies of pure vengeance and pure innocence. Alexie threads dark humor through sorrow and refuses sentimentality, but he leaves Michael poised on the edge of possibility, less a redemption than a first, real step toward it.