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Symbolism In The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part-Time Indian

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Have you ever wanted something so bad but the people around you won’t let you get it? In the book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie this is exactly what happens. The main character is named Arnold who is a Native American that lives on a very poor reservation. He draws cartoons as a symbols of his dreams. Most of the cartoons he draws are very funny but truly have a deeper meaning. The symbol develops the theme that anybody can accomplish anything. At the climax of the story Arnold has to make the biggest decision of his life. He needs to decide whether he should stay with his friends and family, or take a leap of faith into the unknown and depend on luck to find hope (43). Arnold is different from the other kids. He wants a future. He wants a change. He can hardly stand staying in the reservation being in poverty, misunderstood, and already having his future decided for him: to be a poor, uneducated, bullied Indian. At the same time, he knows that if he leaves to go to a different school, everybody on the Rez will shun him. …show more content…

He no longer knows what he is. He doesn’t know if he is a penniless Indian or a want to be rich white kid (59). When Arnold got to his homeroom, his eyes, like magnets, laid sight on the prettiest girl that he had ever seen. All of the sudden his knees went weak and he could hardly breathe. When he got to his seat, she turned around and said, “My name is Penelope! What’s your name?”(59). He replied, and at that moment he forgot all about the mean, judgmental looks he had gotten in the halls and knew that Penelope was his hope, what he had come to Reardan looking

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Thomas Melles K. Dirck Freshman Honor English, Period 6 2 September 2016 Dreams lead everywhere Dreams are what people live for yet, in life, dreams are almost never lived. In The Absolutely true diary of a part-time Indian written by Sherman Alexie the main character Junior tries to follow his dreams. Dreams are what people should strive for but yet many do not even try to follow them. Junior’s sister and Sherman Alexie both were following their dreams to “save their lives”. Junior has a sister in the book who is lived in their basement and was not following her dreams, while in “Superman and Me” Sherman Alexie writes about how he is trying to follow his dreams to save his life.

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In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, Arnold Spirit makes the tough decision to stop attending Wellpinit High School. Arnold was raised around reservation kids all his life and isn’t familiar with the norms of any other group of people. This move brings struggles to both him and his parents. In the novel, Arnold realizes Reardan values the education of their students more than Wellpinit and decides he is better off attending Reardan.

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Sherman Alexie is a talented poet, short story writer, novelist, and performer that grew up on the Spokane Indian reservation. He has published twenty-four books and also written and co-produced a movie. In “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me,” Alexie conveys a story to the reader about how reading and writing significantly changed his life. Living on an Indian reservation in Washington in 1966, Indian children were projected to fail: “We were Indian children who were expected to be stupid. Most lived up to those expectations inside the classroom” (Alexie 364).

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He worked hard to make his dreams reality despite of all the things that tried to hold him back. The Spokane Indian Reservation presented our protagonist with

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The Route Of Bullying Relatively everyone gets bullied or picked on at least once in their life, but for Arnold it’s a daily struggle that he must overcome. Arnold grows up as a small kid with lots of problems as a result of severe brain damage. He lives on an Indian reservation in poverty causing people to pick on him or bully him constantly because he is an easy target. In the novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie shows us how people take advantage of each other’s weaknesses and use it to their own advantage to bully them, as shown when Arnold describes how groups of kids would spin him around and call him globe, when the Andruss brothers beat him up and when Roger told the most racist joke Arnold had ever heard.

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In his book the Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie portrays a teenage boy, Arnold Spirit (junior) living in white man’s world, and he must struggle to overcome racism and stereotypes if he must achieve his dreams. In the book, Junior faces a myriad of misfortunes at his former school in ‘the rez’ (reservation), which occurs as he struggles to escape from racial and stereotypical expectations about Indians. For Junior he must weigh between accepting what is expected of him as an Indian or fight against those forces and proof his peers and teachers wrong. Therefore, from the time Junior is in school at reservation up to the time he decides to attend a neighboring school in Rearden, we see a teenager who is facing tough consequences for attempting to go against the racial stereotypes.

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He is hopeful that he can one day leave the reservation and be successful, the only way to do that is to go to reardon. To conclude, Junior is very optimistic, that he can leave the reservation and become

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The novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian( Alexie S.J., Jr, 2007), written by Sherman Alexie, describes a story about a brave Indian boy called Arnold Spirit Jr. who finds out his potential and always go ahead towards his dream. Read throughout the book, comedy and tragedy always accompany with Arnold`s life. The 14-year-old Indian boy was born with illness and sneer. On the way he grew up, he suffered from various violence from different people. The tragedies in Arnold`s teenage life such as poverty, violence and death give readers deep impression.

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“In the middle of a crazy drunk life, you have to hang on the good and sober moments tightly.” (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie page 216) This is a quote from the book that shows how Junior learns how to appreciate the good moments in life. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie the character Junior faces problems caused by drinking. The book starts off with his family living on the Indian reservation suffering from poverty and death.

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Arnold’s identities seen to clash with each other, which is what makes it known to the audience that Arnold has two different

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Overcoming a challenge, not giving up, and not being afraid of change are a few themes demonstrated in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Perhaps the most prominent theme derived from the novel is defying the odds, or in other words rising above the expectations of others. Junior Spirit exemplifies this theme throughout the entirety of the book. As Junior is an Indian, he almost expects that he will never leave the reservation, become an alcoholic, and live in poverty like the other Indians on the reservation—only if he sits around and does not endeavor to change his fate. When Junior shares the backstory of his parents, he says that his mother and father came from “poor people who came from poor people who came from poor people, all the way back to the very first poor people” (11).

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There are main themes in every novel some may be obvious while some require research and analysis to find. In The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, there are many themes such as bullying, racism, drug abuse and alcoholism. Though only a few of those apply directly to Junior, the protagonist, there is one that he is affected by more than any other. This one is isolation.

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Are sports and competition in general just a games that we shouldn’t be so emotional about, or do they provide an outlet for many people, and can they teach valuable life lessons? I played two sports growing up, baseball and basketball. I enjoyed both but I developed a passion for basketball more than for baseball. I started playing ball when I was in the third grade.

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