Reading Sherman Alexie’s “Superman and Me” not only opened me as the reader up to a new and unfamiliar culture but gave me insight to another’s way of self-teaching and embracing the arts of reading and writing. Throughout his narrative, Alexie details his living style and standards, a brief insight into his family, the historical and modern looks at his heritage, an astounding viewpoint on how he found his passion for reading and how his future in writing came into play. The piece is beautifully molded together, utilizing emotion to help the reader understand the effects reading had on him as a boy and man and what it later instilled in him on his path to becoming a writer. This narrative shows that even with the most unorthodox means, literacy can empower and change lives. Alexie begins his story with a brief history and description of life growing up on the Spokane Indian reservation in Washington in a middle-class reservation standard, though most would view it as poor. He describes it as “a combination of fear, hope, irregular paychecks and government surplus food.” I find this to be significant because even with the drawbacks handed to the family in their life, Alexie details their strong points, their will as a whole to push forward and his drive to follow in the footsteps of his father and read, even without institutionally learning how to do so and being described as an “oddity” on the reservation. The most intriguing part of his story, in my opinion, is where he states the following: “I refused to fail. I was smart. I was arrogant. I was lucky.” In an environment where Indian boys were accepted amongst their society as “failures,” Alexie refused to accept that norm and continued to push himself to learn, to be better than what was expected. The overall message in this essay shows connecting Alexie’s early childhood love of reading to the framing of his