...In the essay “The Joy of Reading and Writing,”Sherman Alexie claims reading saved his life. It explains Alexie’s life as an Indian boy and how reading and writing shaped his life. He learned to read despite having limited resources. Alexie proves that you do not have to be affluent to obtain an education. Alexie and his family come from an underprivileged Indian reservation in eastern Washington state. Although his family was considered very poor in American society, on the reservation he was from a middle class family. This shows how tough life was on the reservation and how much poverty there was. His father had a passion for reading and would buy cheap books from pawnshops. It rubbed off on Alexie and he would pick up books before he could...
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...them, with bullet and fist and saber and boot” (Flight 89, 90). Sherman Alexie is an American novelist, filmmaker, short story writer, and poet. He uses his personal experiences as a Native American to write raw and unvarnished texts that bring forth complicated emotions. You can see an example of Alexie’s unique writing style in the quote above where he boldly states the way violence takes place in his story. As a writer, Alexie targets young adults and teens who may be struggling in their younger years just as he has. Throughout his life, even as a young boy, Alexie had been dealing with struggles and problems in his life. At six months old, Alexie underwent a brain surgery which had a high risk of death or mental disability if he survived (The...
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...Breaking down the doors. Can we control our own destiny? According to Sherman Alexie we can. Alexie is an American writer, he was born to a poor family on an Indian reservation. He is the author of “Superman and Me” which was published on April 19th, 1998. It is a narration of how he taught himself to read at a young age. His story explains how he refused to accept his destiny as a “dumb Indian”. Alexie’s narration is full of vivid metaphors and personal examples. He recalls the first time that he broke through a boundary. He was looking through his superman comic. He could not read the words, so he made up what he thought they were saying. “Superman is breaking down the door.” “Once again, I pretend to read the words and say aloud, “I am breaking down the door.” In this way, I learned to read.” (64) He retells this memory with pride, after all he was only three years old. Once he learned how to read he could not get enough. His father would go to pawn shops and second hand stores for books, Alexie would read them all. Even the car manuals. Alexie’s tone at the beginning was excitement. However, when he gets to the unpleasant part of his story he refers to himself in third person. “He grows into the man who often speaks of his childhood in the third person, as if it will somehow dull the pain and make him sound more modest about his talents.” (64)He is referring to the dumb Indian stereotype. Alexie gives the readers personal examples of how his fellow Indians chose to...
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...In the fifth paragraph, Alexie makes a shift into third person, and establishes an appeal to pathos. Alexie makes the shift when he introduces the fact that Indian children have different expectations in school because of the inequalities they face. If Alexie had been non-Indian “he might have been called a prodigy,” but because he was an “Indian boy...” he was “simply an oddity.” This shift suggests that Alexie feels an internal division to this time period in his past. By using this shift, Alexie adds to his emotional tone because it creates an appeal to pathos that makes his audience feel both sympathy and empathy. Alexie made the decision to include this shift in order to assert how he recognized the inequality Indians face in society, and to declare the painful and conflicting emotions of his past. His audience of Indian youth may feel the same way, which therefore creates a connection...
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...In the literary work entitles ‘Every Little Hurricane’, authored by Sherman Alexie, the main character/ protagonist Victor, experiences numerous challenges throughout his childhood. This short story discusses the figurative storms an adolescent residing on the the Spokane Indian Reservation endures. In Alexie’s work, a challenge Victor encounters in the early exposure to alcohol and the detrimental effect it has. The story is introduced with a New Year’s party hosted by Victor’s parents in the year 1976, and the consumption of alcohol is relentless amongst all the party-goers. Focusing specifically on Arnold and Adolph, Victor’s uncles, two drunkards who become involved in a fracas out in the yard. These two brothers shared a love incomprehensible to strangers, which was ‘stronger than anything. It’s the same bond that causes so much pain’ (p8). Victor’s uncles shared a deep psychological, mutual emotions of complexity, torn between love & hate, slugging around with impetus ‘they had to be in love’. As Victor overlooks eagerly, the celebration is eventually over, as so the scuffle. Another piece of textual evidence indicating the malign result that liquor possesses is found on Page 7, where Victor recollects the a memory from when he was 5 years old....
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...According to the 2010 U.S. census, about 22% of our country’s 5.2 million Native Americans live on tribal lands along with reservations. The main character in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie is about a Native American who lives on a reservation and learns to follow his own path. The topics in this essay are Indian reservations, Indian schools and, Indians today. Some Indians on reservations are very poor, for example, “I picked up the other boot and dug in side. Man, that thing smelled like booze and fear and failure. I found a wrinkled and damp five dollar bill. “Merry Christmas,” the dad said.” This quote is on page 153. This quote made a point because, junior’s dad is an acholic and because the dad saved...
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...Richele Tucker Stacie Sather English 305 15 November 2013 The novel, The Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexi is about a young American Indian boy who decides to leave the reservation to better his life. He starts out finding himself through this change in his life and continues to grow and change into the young man he wants to become. At the beginning of the novel he seems frustrated because he is told he must do as the others on the reservation and he seems to feel mistreated when he does exactly like the youth on the reservation. By the end of the story he seems to change his outlook and goes through a realization of reality and he seems to feel more hopeful that he isn’t the only one who isn’t perfect in this crazy and vast world. When he is in school upon the res he feels like there no way to get very far. He states that all the hope is with the white people. So he decided to change school after getting in trouble in the reservation math class for throwing a 30 year old math text book at the teacher. The teacher later talks to junior and gives him hope to see he can do better and the teacher believes he will but he needs to take advantage of all the resources her can. In that he finds himself looking into going to Reardon junior high school. Reardon is an all-white junior high which junior views as perfect. Though upon entering this school he comes to realize that’s not all true. He notices that the problems found on the reservation...
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...The Absolutely True Diary of Part-Time Indian: a Journey of Hope “There is another world, but it is in this one” (W.B Yeats), this is how Sherman Alexie managed to begin the journey of his eye-opening novel, The Absolutely True Dairy of Part-time Indian. It is a magnificent story of overcoming the obstacles of being an Indian teenager while stepping outside of the reservation world and striving for better opportunities in the world. Junior, who carries the Native American blood in his roots, gives an insight into Native American culture, encompassing all of its sacred and astonishing details. Through Junior’s experience and between the storylines, various aspects of the Spokane Indians community are revealed, such as poverty, alcoholism, and kinship that make the novel stand as an unique Indian literature piece....
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...Arman Zarbashi Professor Jeremy Harris English 1101 13 September 2017 Superman and Me Rhetorical Analysis Sherman Alexie uses many rhetorical devices such as repetition, hyperbole, alliteration and imagery. Many people around the world do not know how to read or write. It is a worldwide dilemma. Nearly every school requires some kind of reading/writing in order to advance in the education world. Sherman Alexie, taught himself to read and therefore saved many people's lives. People did not believe in him but Sherman Alexie was self-motivated. In the whole passage, Alexie talks about how he self-taught himself and wants the audience to know that. He talks about how his family was poor and how they "lived on a combination of irregular...
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...Notably Sherman Alexie was an intelligent and extraordinary filmmaker, poet, performer, and novelist. Alexie grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit. Then, he attended Washington State University in Pullman and received his BA in American Studies. Alexie childhood years were very strenuous for him. Being born with a condition called hydrocephalic caused him to suffer from random seizures and bed wetting. He was also dealing with the pain that his father caused by leaving him and his mother at a young age without any explanation of his actions, which caused Alexie to become exceedingly hostile and bitter towards his father. Through every piece of work that he has written, we learn more about Alexie's childhood. Alexie's poems...
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...such as land, wealth, and power they forget about the people around them and treat them as if they are not of the same species. The same idea is shared by the author Sherman Alexie in his essay “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me”. The essay reflects upon the life of an Indian boy living in a reservation in today’s America. His main argument highlights how determination is a useful weapon when it comes to facing segregation in a society, and offers insight of how he is trying to save the children currently living on these reservation by getting them to open up to literacy and adaptation. Alexie was made a victim of racism. He was in an environment where the society’s restrictions allowed no one to go further in life. Everyone was required to follow the same old tradition and be under certain standards. Most followed these beliefs, but Alexie, he was different. He always loved reading and hoped to become a pediatrician. He was considered an oddity by his own people for being smart. He never liked the negative influences of the Indians and therefore never followed them. For this he always got in a brawl with his classmates, “They wanted me to stay quite when the non-Indian teacher asked for answers, for volunteers, for help. We were Indian children who were expected to be stupid” (Alexie 17). Alexie views this as an opportunity to show the outside world how an Indian society works. How...
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...an essay called “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me” which is written by Sherman Alexie several days before. I noticed this essay because of its heading which is interesting. In this article, Alexie aims to tell millennials, especially those from India that the way he acquired literacy and how he succeeded in a non-Indian World despite the negative expectations of Indian people in US society. Alexie starts this article with a short story about the book which encourages him to read. He says: “We were poor by most standard …… I still remember the exact moment when I first understood, with a sudden clarity, the purpose of a paragraph” (12). Alexie establishes pathos by describing the poverty in his childhood and the happiness when he understood the paragraph. Readers could get into his story and they doubt the relationship between those books and his brilliant literacy. He also establishes pathos with some sentences like “As Indian children, we were expected to fail in the non-Indian world. Those who failed were ceremonially accepted by other Indians and appropriately pitied by non-Indians. I refused to fail” (12). These words are easy to affect the audience’s emotional response. So it will be easier for Alexie to persuade millennials to read books and benefit from books. Then Alexie tells that he read and learned a lot from books after that. According to his own experience, Alexie says that millennials should read books as much as they can. Also, he states that “We...
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...14, 2015 Yujie Chen Poverty influences Poverty is one of the main problem in the world, either developed country or developing country. Poverty both influence developed country, America and developing country, Mexico. In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian and The Devil’s Highway, they both facing the poverty issue. Sherman Alexie is telling us about the Indian American living in a hard life and Luis Alberto Urrea is telling us about the poor Mexican people migrating to United States for gaining wealth. Both of the two stories meets the same problem which is poverty forcing them to make change. The path to success are tough and hard, both of them have to discard something for the cost. However, their ending are not the same. Sherman Alexie is telling us the real life of Indian American who still lives in the Indian reservation. For those people, their poverty are generational and inheritance. “Seriously, I know my mother and father had their dreams when they were kids. They dreamed about being something other than poor, but they never got the chance to be anything because nobody paid attention to their dreams” (Sherman Alexie 12). As Arnold talks about his parents living in poor, he is helpless and feeling despairing because he knew that the poverty has been an issue for the Indian American for many generations. To think about more deeply, another view of what Arnold says is, he still believe that Indian people are equal to other ones. Not only they have the...
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...In the essay “Superman and Me”, an extended metaphor is used to explain the connection between the author and Superman. Superman and the author have had a strong connection for a long time. When Sherman Alexie was three years old, he picked up a Superman comic while lying in the floor. Alexie’s dad always brought home books all the time, so Alexie read all the time. Superman and the author have always been together through Alexie’s childhood, school days, and adulthood. In Alexie’s childhood he was teased for being an indian child so he decided to stand out from the rest. “ I learned to read with a Superman comic.” This explains that Alexie was a young prodigy in school while others struggled. “I was three years old…” This shows that Alexie...
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...Sherman Alexie ENG 150 – Critical Analysis Assignment Fingerprints Recently, I was introduced to a man named Sherman Alexie. See, what I liked about Sherman from the beginning was the dissimilarity we shared. Too often, as a society we get so caught up in the bait of commonality that we forget it’s the differences that make us individuals. His family was not like mine. The significant values that shape a young man’s life, like Sherman’s and mine, were founded on different life experiences and were respected on unfamiliar levels. I came to see he loved differently and for different reasons. He esteemed for different reasons and his perception on life was remarkable yet understated. Sherman had a way of seeing things… the realness he bestowed was astonishing, but more importantly, he was able to help me see differently too. You’re asking, “Where did you meet this Sherman Alexie?” The answer to that question is difficult to state because I feel like I’ve known him my whole life, but I doubt he’d say the same of me. The Absolutely True Story of a Part Time Indian is a novel by Sherman Alexie written for anyone willing to read it. It displays his inner deepest thoughts through the story of a young man named Junior. The great thing about being introduced to a man through his work is that he reveals himself to you through nothing but the deepest and best thoughts; and Sherman had many. Sherman Alexie was a Native American who grew up on a reservation in Spokane...
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