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Sherman Alexie's Superman And Me

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In his short autobiographical essay “Superman and Me,” Sherman Alexie uses powerful sentences, visualization, and repetition to create a well-written vivid story. Alexie addresses his own childhood experiences with education. He was a young boy that lived in poverty on an Indian reservation where Indians were derided for being educated. He states that “Indian children were expected to fail in the non-Indian world” (Alexie 584). His parents would be considered poor in most western standards, but to reservation standards they were a middle-class family. Even with the odds of expectation and poverty against him, Alexie describes how he escaped these circumstances by teaching himself how to read. This ambition for success derived from his father who had a passion for reading. Because of his love and dedication to his father, he decided to have the same passion. Before he could read words he was able to review his father’s books and distinguish what a paragraph was. This initiated his path to success by comparing everything in his life to a paragraph “a paragraph was a fence that …show more content…
I admired that as a young Indian boy raised on a reservation, he taught himself how to read. Native Americans are expected to play the stereotypical role in order to be accepted in their tribe. “A smart Indian is a dangerous person, widely feared and ridiculed by Indians and non-Indians alike” as a reader, I perceived this as a powerful statement that knowledge is power, and to others Alexie was a threat (Alexie 584). This is what Alexie was trying to explain as one of his struggles that he overcame by beating statistics and social expectations of being a Native American. By teaching himself how to read, it reveals his determination and bravery. It is admirable that Alexie wants to share his own life story, he is one step closer to aiding young Native American’s strive for an education to improve their

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