Comparative Analysis Between Two Trickster Tales

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COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS BETWEEN TWO TRICKSTER TALES
Two of literature’s complex pieces come together under scrutiny in this comparative literary analysis -- The Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight. In 1989, Maxine Hong Kingston published her third installment from her original fictions, The Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. Set in the 1960s, the tale follows Chinese-American Wittman Ah Sing in his San Francisco escapades -- from his relationships to his cultural conflicts finding it difficult to accept his Chinese ancestry. Later on and almost throughout his adventures, he fixates on how he is so similar to that of Journey to the West’s Sun Wukong, a Monkey King. However, in the end, he comes into terms with his conflicts and accepts his culture and ancestry. On the other hand, Sherman Alexie published The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven in 1993. Frequently identified as a short-story collection, this book contains twenty-two interconnecting tales, which have recurring characters. Two young male Native Americans, Victor and Thomas, occupy the protagonist roles, whose tales depict their history with their family and the people who live in the Spokane Indian Reservation, their desires, and their relationships. Noticing how both books comprise of cultural flair, there are certainly more similarities between the two yet are different from each other. In this essay, how these two tales relate to one another will be determined.
Among the focal points of their similarities, Tripsmaster Monkey: His Fake Book and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven centers around the trickster figure. He is often the main character of tales described by multiculturalism and postmodernism. In other words, a cultural paladin of indigenous myths. Exaggeration finds its way as a feature distinctive of such specified fiction. Although exaggerated, reality floats somewhere in the mainstream (Jacobs, 2006). Wittman Ah Sing rather unequivocally refers to a traditional trickster character, the Monkey King. Because he is of Asian physique, he experiences the stereotypical racial discrimination; however, this is self-inflicted as he does not accept that norms of his own ancestry. He appoints himself on the margins of social-cultural standing, setting his own platform for misdemeanor, which pinpoints the defects of both his ethnic community and the American society. The Monkey King inserts a scenario each time he could as a result of Wittman Ah Sing’s disruptive orchestrations. For instance, the scene where he reads to a Chinese-American woman a poetry he created in an attempt of seduction, the said woman tells him how it sounds “black”. He starts to imitate the Monkey King, angrily jumping around and dauntingly yelling at her. Another appearance of the Monkey imitation is depicts when he hears a racist trifle in a restaurant:
“You like jokes? I tell you joke. What’s ten inches long and white? Nothing, ha ha. Every gringo doesn’t have one. Why you not laughing? I funny, you not funny. You nauseating. You ruin my dinner. You slur all over my food with dirty not-funny joke.” (Kingston 214)
He ends up ranting to the j...