Trauma and the Limits of Empathy in Sherman Alexie’s Flight 123 Studies in American Fiction 42.1 (2015): 123–144 © 2015 by Johns Hopkins University Press Beyond 9/11: Trauma and the Limits of Empathy in Sherman Alexie’s Flight Lydia R. Cooper Creighton University I n 2007, while working on his National Book Award-winning young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie wrote and published an almost-epigrammatic novel, Flight. This latter brief book was inspired in part by a documentary on 9/11, in which some of the fight instructors who had trained the ter- rorists to fy expressed their sense of betrayal at the use to which their instruction had been put. 1 Flight provides an extended analysis of betrayal and guilt, although, perhaps counter-intuitively, the book has a more hopeful resolution than almost any of Alexie’s other novels to date. 2 In fact, the surprising moment of grace at the end of Flight suggests that the book is positioned in response to American national rhetoric that isolates the events of 9/11 as a “rupture” in history. Instead, the novel contextualizes the terrorist at- tacks of September 11, 2001 within a condensed history of acts of domestic terror on U.S. soil, primarily focusing on acts committed by European Americans against Indigenous Americans. Flight thus poses a critique of national responses to the catastrophe as a na- tional catastrophe. Constructing a series of fragmentary scenes of violence while leaving implicit the actual events of 9/11, Flight simultaneously critiques popular defnitions and descriptions of collective trauma while exploring the potential for the semiotics of trauma narratives to expose suffering and to create spaces for healing. The main narrative arc of the novel—a brutalized adolescent turns his rage against the American public by fring an automatic weapon in a crowded bank—is an ordinary enough, if horrifying, story. But Flight takes a turn for the supernatural as the