In life you have many choices. One of which is deciding whether or not you are going to succeed or fail in life. In other words, choosing to stay hopeful or not. In the “Absolute True Diary of a Part- Time Indian” Junior goes through many situations where hope is needed. The author Sherman Alexie puts Junior as well as other characters in situations to make those hard decisions.
In the beginning of the book, Junior says that living on the reservation has generations of Indians losing hope. They accept their lives as their ancestors did.. His parents couldn't follow their dreams because they didn't have a support system. Junior is the example of how one can break the path of the traditional life on the reservation if one has the motivation and a good support system. Junior had the love and emotional support of his parents and was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to attend a prestigious Prep school based on the suggestion of Mr. P, a teacher at the rez school.
Junior being born on the Reservation has always been poor and put down by others. He has had a horrible life with pain coming from a new direction each day but has coped with it that is why he is still alive today to write this book. Although he may or may not admit it, the ways he coped with his life were not great after all. When faced with a
In “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” internal and external expectations shaped Junior’s life by giving him the strength to grow and give him a reason to live. Growing up in a discriminated Indian reservation, external expectations told Junior to never leave the reservation for something better. “Reservations were supposed to move onto reservations and die. We were supposed to disappear” (216). Everyone around Junior created this picture that Indians were expected to never stray from the reservation.
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.
In “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian” by Sherman Alexie, the most important chapter is “Hope Against Hope” because it shows the theme of hope. This is the chapter where Mr. P talks personally to Junior about life and his sister so he can understand her better. Eventually he tells Junior to leave the reservation and to find a better life for himself. But, without this chapter Junior might not have ever left the reservation and gone to Rearden.
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.
It is uncommon to try to branch out and achieve high goals. Junior mentions this commonality at the beginning of his journey, “Poverty doesn't give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty teaches you how to be poor” (Alexie 13). Junior fights this by moving to a predominantly white school, his goal is to get out of the reservation. Impressively, his sister also fights this when she spontaneously decides to get married and move far away from her family.
In the beginning of the book Junior decides to leave his school on the reservation for a better education at an all-white high school in Reardan “whose mascot was an Indian, thereby making me the only other indian in town” (Alexie 56). Junior’s poverty makes him nervous about attending this school because he has so little money in a school where people are rich. This is the main difference between the two. “My parents gave me just enough money so that I could pretend to have more money than I did.” (Alexie 199).
Junior’s life as a Native American on a reservation is different from a non-native American's life
It is a very emotional scene, showing a change in identity. Junior wants to be himself, but also to go out and to seize amazing opportunities beyond the reservation. Junior decides to do both. He stays on the rez, but also commits to going to school in Reardan, an all-white town outside the reservation. People aren’t born strong - they become strong.
Junior is a teenage boy who is different from everyone else on the reservation. He has big goals, but he is an outcast so nobody pays attention to him. When he moves and plays his first game against his old school, everyone thinks he is a traitor and “boos” him. He feels more accepted at Reardan than his home school.
He constantly mentions the need to prove his capabilities to others. Junior is caught up in his own rage and ambition when he makes many of his choices. As mentioned, one of the most radical decisions Junior makes is when he decides to leave the reservation school to attend Reardan. It is important to note he is convinced to leave the reservation after his teacher tells him he should. Therefore in this particular example Junior demonstrates that his innocence and impressionability motivates him to go against his cultural norms in order to stay away from the pain and misery that he has seen people in Wellpinit drown under.
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).
Capitalist argument Capitalism allows the producer to contain his own material to sell, thus earning a profit. Those that have private owned stores are able to change the price to benefit the consumer, however socialist can not. Socialist producers follow the government or communities orders, like if the price goes up or down. For example the gas station's gas price is the same no matter where you go. This affects competition because if the gas is the same everywhere than there's no competition, however, if a capitalist gas station opened up then the price would be lower than the socialist gas.
