Summary of Search Engine, a Short Story by Sharman Alexie

It is a short story by Sharman Alexie. He is the poet of Reservation. He basically writes about the people who are living on the reservation (Spokane Indian) who are facing the problems from the White’. He writes about tribalism. This short story has got the name on the basis of its theme, that the girl was searching for different things and also searching for a Spokane Indian writer Harlan Atwater whose work she finds from Washington State University Library.

 

Summary

 

This story is about a girl named Corliss joseph who loves reading poetry and books. She is the only girl who likes to live alone, away from her family, and keeps herself bound in a room all the time. She is in search of a writer of her own tribe (Spokane Indian) and wants to read his/her written books.

In the story, The Search Engine, Alexie Sherman talks about a young woman's journey to find a poet who has given her much interest. Her name is Corliss, and she is a college student who is finding a new journey of her own. This story shows many examples of coming of age through Corliss’s life. She is living alone and finding out what she is passionate about, she’s transforming from the typical Indian lifestyle into becoming her own person, also realizing that everyone, including herself, is on a unique journey that involves making personal choices. I think Alexie is trying to tell us as a reader that being an adult is all about transforming from having no independent choices as a kid, and then finding out about how you need to start making independent choices for yourself as an adult.
When I think of becoming of age milestone, I think about when I first moved into college and how that was a big transformation in my life because I was living on my own. Like Corliss, she is living alone in an apartment, in college and I feel like that symbolizes a big part in becoming a child to an adult. “Indians were terrified of being lonely, of being exiled, but Corliss had always dreamed of solitude” (Sherman, 10). This quote expresses her love for being newly independent and how she is interested in being alone and away from her family. Another thing I realized when I got to college, was how many hobbies I was interested in that I didn’t know before. Like Corliss done in her college’s library. As she enters the library, she finds some books and meanwhile, she comes to see a book of poetry, and when she sees the writer of that book, she is amazed and got confused. Because this was the book written by a writer who belongs to her tribe. His name is Harlan Atwater. As she finds that book, she desires to meet the writer, because he calls himself a spoken Indian and she was in search of such a writer. Another she does in the library is that she finds the library full of many books but there is no single reader, then she asks the librarian how many readers come here to read these books. Librarian told that a very low number of people use to read books. Then she says that it cannot be a library, it’s an orphanage, and a book is not a book until it is not read by someone. This book was about three decades old and the writer was not known to anyone. She searched from different sources, asks from everyone in the college, from the writers of that age, from publishers, and searched from government sector records and from criminal records, but found nothing. She takes the book with herself and went home. There she set to read the book, and she comes across an interview that was taken from Harlan to a company. From that, she comes to know the address of that man and then contacts him, but he does not provide her with information about himself. She also reads sonnets from that book like, Love Song, Poverty, etc.

Here are some lines from “Love Song”

I have loved you during the powwow

I have loved you during the rodeo

I have loved you from jail

I have loved you from Browning, Montana

I have loved you like a drum, and a drummer

I have loved like Holy man

 

Then after holding that book, she sets on a journey and at last, she meets the writer whom she wants to meet. But she does not have any special conversation with him about him. He tells that he uses this name for his work but his original name is different. Then she tries to ask for his actual name but he does reply anymore and went away to his home and she stays at the place where she meets him. Harlan is also the same kind of man as she is. He was adopted by someone to grow because his wild parents left him alone and that is the reason he does not want to connect with his family. He is in the sixties and now he is not able to do anything further. But Corliss is a young girl of about 19s and is eager to do a lot and to study many books by the writer of her tribe because Sharman Alexie use to write about the tribalism and the people of the reservation. So she wants to write works of those writers who write about the Spokane Indians and he also belongs to her culture that is why she loves to read him and wants more works like that. Both Corliss and Harlan love to read poetry and both like to live alone and discover new things.

Here in this short story, there is a concept of “lost soul”. The question is why Sharman Alexie uses the term lost soul in this story? As far as my own point of view is concerned, the answer to this question is that both the characters of this story like to live alone and to read books and both of them want to know themselves because they think that they both have no identity, both are in search of themselves.

Keywords;    Search Engine