The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, written by Sherman Alexie, is a semi-biographical book about an Indian boy named Arnold. Arnold lives on an Indian reservation but, he attends school off the reservation in a town where the population is majority white people. Throughout the entire book you can see how Arnold internal struggles and the struggles he was with “white power”. An example would be the title of the book, the “Part-Time Indian “part especially stand outs because, it helps illustrate Arnold struggles with his personal life and with “white power”. The title illustrates with by helping express Arnolds struggles to fit in, his home life, and finding himself.
The Path to Identity People often say they know who they are when they really don’t. Some people just don’t care, but the ones that do, the ones that are willing to go the extra mile to find out, those are the people that will be successful in life. To find out who you really are, you need to be persistent because life will throw everything it has at you to keep you from being successful but you need to be willing to go the extra mile to make it. In the book Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Alexie Sherman Arnold perseveres through numerous hardships on his path to identity.
“To live without hope is to cease to live” – Fyodor Dostoevsky. For the natives that live on the Spokane reservation, life seems meaningless, for they lack hope because they are surrounded by poverty, violence, and alcohol. “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” by Sherman Alexie tells of the journey that a young native boy goes through on his journey to a better life. Arnald Spirit Jr. is a 14-yr old boy entering high school when he decides to transfer to an all-white school off the rez. Alexie incorporates many themes into the story, with the biggest ones being resilience, expectations, and cultural identity.
In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, the author discusses the theme
In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, Alexie’s purpose of the importance of having hope is recurring through Junior’s
Ava Sassin Mr. Rodriguez Academic Literacy 21 April 2023 ATD Analysis Essay Hitting until blood is drawn is what seems to be the foundation of protecting yourself and inflicting pain on those who have threatened you. This is a way a lot of Spokane Indians deal with conflict, including Junior. The novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian written by Sherman Alexie is a realistic fiction novel that takes place on a poor and hopeless reservation. Arnold Junior is the protagonist in the story who struggles to accept the truth that lies beneath his reservation.
In the novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie there are many themes and major flaws in society that get pointed out. One major theme explored by Alexie, is standing up for your beliefs and to make things change no matter how hard that may be. The Character Junior (Also called Arnold) is a character that truly expresses this theme and is able to blossom through the ideas behind this theme. In the book Junior not only goes to a new and better school but, he also leaves the reservation and even takes on the reservation sports teams in order to follow his dreams and do what he finds right. The first way Junior is able to stand up for his ideas and change his world for the better is by moving to a new school.
Hello Sherman Alexie, I just finished reading your book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, and I am overwhelmed with a lot of different emotions and thoughts. The writing as well as the illustrations in this book made it a very engaging and memorable read. I loved the character of Arnold and how he intuitive he was about himself and those around him. In the book Arnold seems like he will also fall into the cycle of poverty and alcoholism in the book.
Junior loses a lot of friends and family at the young age of fourteen. He gets bullied because he was born with too much cerebral spinal fluid inside his skull, but he has his best friend Rowdy there to help him. Junior realizes that he needs to leave the reservation to get a better life for himself. He goes to a new school off the
As Winston Churchill said,” Success is not final. Failure is not fatal”. It is the perseverance and hope to continue that counts. This is the story of a boy named Junior whose key is his hope. The Absolutely True Diary is the life story of a Arnold Spirit (Junior) and his efforts to break the stereotypes about Indians.
In the novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part - Time Indian, a young Native American teenager named Arnold Spirit changes the minds of himself and people around him as he transcends Native American racial stereotypes. Throughout the story, Arnold influences the world around him by proving that Native Americans can find hope and succeed in a community dominated by Caucasian Americans. In the beginning of the novel, Arnold begins to see the restrictions of being a Native American on a Washington State reservation, because of this Arnold finds himself fighting the doubts and changing the minds of himself and the people around him as he pushes himself further away from a life on the reservation. Arnold begins to feel the restrictions of
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).
After all, I was a reservation Indian, and no matter how geeky and weak I appeared to be, I was still a potential killer.” -Junior p.63 Early inhabitants believed that they were barbaric and primitive, knowing this Junior believes that his caucasian classmates at Rearden view him the same way as their racist ancestors. That is not to say he is not bullied at home because they are all the same race. On his reservation Wellpinit, Junior is a target due to his physical disabilities(a stutter, and epilepsy) but at his school, he is the direct result of years of stereotypes.
The Art of Sherman Throughout the Novel “The Absolutely True Diary of a part-time Indian” the author Sherman Alexie uses art to accentuate certain emotion and thought. The author accomplishes this through comic book art styles. The art not only stresses the story, buy completes it by being an integral source of story development throughout the novel. Along with being important to the story, the art also conveys meaning that the words on the page do not convey.
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.
