by Megan Pierce

Created on: June 01, 2010

Developing an identity based on the relationships between family members is difficult for Sherman Alexie’s main character of his novel Flight.  “My real name isn’t important,” confesses Zits, the narrator and main character, who is struggling with discovering his own identity. Alexie stresses the importance of family relations through the experiences and trials of Zits, and forces him to realize that family members greatly influence who he has become. In his continuous efforts to discern his emotional and physical belonging, Zits travels throughout time to historical eras of suffering and difficulty.

            Zits is a fifteen-year-old foster child who struggles with a security of belonging to a family. “I keep trying to figure out where I am,” Zits admits during the first chapter, “then I remember: This is my new foster home.” Sadly, he uses this need for a family as a crutch and blames his upbringing for everything that he goes through. He has a difficult time adjusting to another home and because of his lack of a true family unit; he realizes that “I’m ashamed of being fifteen years old. And being tall. And skinny. And ugly… I wonder if loneliness causes acne.” Not only is Zits dealing with his coming-of-age on his own, but he is also profoundly concerned with his appearance and “ashamed that I look like a bag of zits tied to a broomstick…trust me, my zit-shame is killing me.” For an adolescent coping without acceptance of physical looks, Zits makes himself psychologically ugly based on the mere fact that he hates his looks and his acne. This causes him to become extremely emotionally confused, and as a result of this, Zits attempts to justify his actions by claiming that “I haven’t been raised by anybody” and “I’m never in any one place long enough to care.”

            Alexie portrays Zits as a teenager who is putting on a tough appearance to make up for his lack of self-confidence, and because of this, “I get into arguments and fistfights with everybody. I get so angry that I go blind and deaf and mute.” Not only does his physical appearance cause Zits to become emotionally knotted up, but also the fact that he is half-Indian and the son of an Indian drunkard who abandoned him in infancy. Alexie places

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