A Message of Rebellion in There There

     The seemingly disparate stories present in Tommy Orange’s novel all combine to create an image of Urban Indian life in Oakland, providing many different faces to a group that is often ignored. Through the character of Dene, Orange makes his intentions clear: “There are so many stories here… that’s just what our community needs considering how long it’s been ignored, has remained invisible… We haven’t seen the Urban Indian story.” (40) By focusing on different characters, he achieves this multi-faceted approach toward telling the Urban Indian story, but, unlike Dene, he has a direction. And that direction is not just education, but rebellion.

     As Dene, Orange speaks of rage and passion behind the silencing of his demographic’s voices, a theme repeated in each character’s story; for example, Edwin’s cyber-obsessed life leaves him feeling unheard by his mother and causes a great deal of frustration toward himself and the world. Only when he begins to express his anger and use his heritage to take action to rebel against what he views as an oppressive, unbeatable force – his weight – does he experience relief and does his blockage (both physical and mental) suddenly break.

     This relates to humor studies as Freud believed that all humor is a form of rebellion – an elaboration on the concept of humor being derived from relief. This can be applied to when Edwin soils his pants while trying to do a sit-up. One would normally view this as sad, but the fact that he succeeds in sitting up makes it no longer tragic; we are relieved at his success, and it becomes humorous. And as this success which causes the relief is inherently rebellious, then the humor itself becomes rebellious, too, thereby adding to the novel’s main themes of rebellion.