In the short story "Because My Father Said He Was The Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play "the star spangledbanner" At Woodstock." The main character shows thatsometimes you have to let the bad things in life go and hang on to t...

         The main character went to jail for protesting against war.  “My father went through a different kind of war behind bars. ‘There were Indian gangs and white gangs and black gangs and Mexican gangs.’ He told me once. My father went through all of that and, never got in to any serous trouble. Some how avoided rape and got out of jail just in time to hitchhike to Woodstock to watch Jimi Hendrix play “the star spangled banner”(48-49). The father went through a lot of physical and mental pain. Right after jail the father went to Woodstock to for get about all the pain he went through.         The main character figuratively became drinking buddies with Jimi Hendrix. He continued to play the tape he got a Woodstock for twenty years. This caused a result of the family growing further and further apart. “Jimi Hendrix and my father became drinking buddies. Jimi Hendrix waited for my father to come home after a long night of drinking.”(49) The main character would feel so guilty the day after a drinking binge that he would tell his child stories to make up for it, why it was more looked down upon if a Indian man left his children, than if I white man did.

         “If you don’t like things you remember, then all you have to do is change the memories. Instead of remembering the bad things, remember what happened immediately before. That’s what I learned from my father” (53).  This is why his father went right to Woodstock after he got out of jail. He needed company, to have people around him, and overall good times to get out of his depression.  He plays the tape as an “escape” When he starts to think of the jail time he had. He plays Jimi and remembers the good times at Woodstock and his early memories.  

The way you look at life and the things that you remember will help you in the future. The main character in this short story by Sherman Alexie, left his family, his wife said that half of the reason that the family was torn apart was by Jimi Hendrix. “This might be the only marriage broken up be a dead guitar player” ( 53).  The father likes to be alone more than he likes to be with other people even his own family. And the only thing that the father has left is his Jimi Hendrix tape. The father cannot see his son grow up he can’t be with his wife and he has no one to love. How else would the father be able to survive with the choices he made?