Alexlie's Use Of Imagery Analysis

Purpose: Alexie highlights how he ultimately overcame the hardships suffered during his early years due to his Indian ethnicity and displays how Native Americans were, and continue, to suffer from discrimination.

Alexie uses metaphor to illustrate his experience of reading and writing. As an Indian, he reads a large number

Throughout this essay, Alexie uses an extended analogy. Alexie’s analogies help the reader understand the purpose of a paragraph. He realized that “a paragraph was a fence that held words. The words inside a paragraph worked together for a common purpose.” He compares a paragraph with a fence which brings clarity to his understanding of a paragraph. From this understanding, he began to think of everything in terms of paragraphs. For example, “Our reservation was a small paragraph within the United States. My family’s house was a paragraph, distinct from the other paragraphs of Labrets to the north, the Fords to our south and the Tribal School to the west.” He uses this idea that each paragraph is an identity and inside those identities are smaller ones. Alexie even says that his family is like a seven-paragraph essay, each different but linked by genetics and common experiences. This allusion allows the audience to see Alexie’s point of view on the world.

(Well, most of them.)”, also contains many different language styles and rhetorical devices. Imagery is very evident in this passage. By using very descriptive adjectives in his writing, like “handsome, blue-eyed”, “impossibly pale neck”, “splattered with Day-Glo Hollywood war paint”, and “greasy popcorn, flat soda pop, fossilized licorice rope”, Alexie paints a vivid image in the mind of the reader. Any writer can describe something, but he takes it one step higher with adjectives that appeal to the senses, especially sight. This imagery adds intensity and value to the piece that otherwise would not have been there. Much like in “Indian Education”, “I Hated Tonto (Still Do)” contains repetition. In the last section of the essay, Alexie discusses cinematic Indians and how he was so different from them, which really discouraged him as a child. He explains, “A cinematic Indian is supposed to climb mountains. I am afraid of heights. A cinematic Indian is supposed to wade into streams and sing songs. I don’t know how to swim. A cinematic Indian is supposed to be a warrior. I haven’t been in a fistfight since sixth grade and she beat the crap out of me.” The repetition of the phrase, “A cinematic Indian is supposed to”, in contrast to what Alexie was like emphasizes how he would often feel that his dreams were unattainable. Overall,

The new soldiers’ resistance was usually followed by an attempt to flee which brought shame and embarrassment to both the new soldiers and their families. Subsequent to the attempt to flee came a final adoption to the war in which O’Brien and many others tried so hard to get out of. O’Brien uses elements such as conflict, imagery, and tone to help convey his

Growing up as a Native American boy on a reservation, Sherman Alexie was not expected to succeed outside of his reservation home. The expectations for Native American children were not very high, but Alexie burst out of the stereotype and expectations put by white men. Young Native Americans were not expected to overcome their stereotypes and were forced to succumb to low levels of reading and writing “he was expected to fail in a non-Indian world” (Alexie 3), but Alexie was born with a passion for reading and writing, so much so that he taught himself to read at age three by simply looking at images in Marvel comics and piecing the words and pictures together. No young Native American had made it out of his reservation to become a successful writer like he did. This fabricates a clear ethos for Alexie, he is a perfect underdog in an imperfect world.

“His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole...,” writes O’Brien as he studies the deceased enemy (118). Throughout the novel, the author shows consistency with repeating stories and lines in a way to present a greater image. He reminds the reader of details the elaborate his larger view. When he writes of the man he killed, he wants the reader to imagine themselves in his shoes, as he imagined himself in the enemies’. As he carefully studies the dead man, he imagines how the boy found himself in the war. By relating American society to the boy’s village of My Khe, he bridges similarities connecting the two by a culture that promotes defending one’s land and ways of life. By saying, “he would have been taught that to defend the land was a man’s highest duty and highest privilege,” he shows there is minimal difference between how most Americans view the military and the duty of the villagers in My Khe (119). Although he had not known the exact history of the boy, he attempted to illustrate in his own mind what his life may have been like prior to the invasion. The inability for O’Brien to walk away from the body as Kiowa continued to pry him away says he was troubled by the similarities. Despite Kiowa saying it could have been him lying lifeless on

As he grew up to become a writer, we see pain in the story he tells. “I loved those books, but I also knew that love had only one purpose. I was trying to save my life” (pg.18). Alexie wanted to be someone greater than what others expected him to be. People would put him down constantly, but he fought back just as much. He tried to save himself from the stereotypes of being just another dumb Indian. He had more determination to prove others wrong when it came too exceeding in reading to further excel in his daily life.

At the same time, O’Brien struggles with destructiveness of the conflicting images of violence and peace in death through the juxtaposition of the imagery of the dead man. While “his one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole.” The dead man has one shut eye that resembles a peaceful sleep, while the other side is obliterated by the grenade into a star-shaped hole. The image of the star-shaped hole in the dead soldier’s eye represents the hopes that he once had when he was alive: “He hoped the Americans would go away. Soon, he hoped. He kept hoping and hoping, always” (119). Furthermore, “his right cheek was smooth and hairless,” an image of untouched innocence that contrasts with his left cheek, which was “peeled back in three ragged strips,” destroyed by the violence O’Brien inflicts upon it. The juxtaposition of the butterfly that settles on his chin and the fatal wound on his neck, “open to the spinal cord…blood…thick and shiny” illustrate the complexity and ambiguity of the unnaturalness of war, depicted by the image of the dead man’s wrung neck, contrasted with the ironic peace and naturalism of death in the image of the fragile butterfly. These select images are also those that O’Brien chooses to fixate upon and develop throughout the chapter as he struggles to comprehend the moral implications of his actions. The innocence of the “slim, dead, almost dainty young man” is further reinforced when O’Brien describes his wrists as “wrists of a

In “The Cask of Amontillado,” Edgar Allen Poe uses many examples of imagery, such as the descriptions of the carnival, characters, the walk through the catacombs, and much more throughout the story to build suspense and intrigue for the readers and add to the mystery of Montresor’s underlining actions of the revenge and deception of the foolish Fortunado.

On his seventh day he got into what is referenced to as " the weirdest fist fight " of his life. At this point Alexie composes a list called " The Unofficial and Unwritten (but you better follow them or you 're going to get beaten twice as hard) Spokane Indian Rules of Fisticuffs. Basically, this list says: you have to fight even if you only think you 're being insulted. By putting this list in his story Alexie is creating a portal into society 's expectations of the Spokane Indian reservation to give the reader a better understanding of the Native American culture.

Alexie wants to show how he is affected by racism in his time and how even though there have been laws passed not to discriminate against people. Whenever police brutality is a main issue in today's era, then that means that racism has not been resolved. Alexie is proving the issue and proving that it has permanently scarred people to where they can’t fall asleep knowing they will be okay in the morning. Whereas the people that are causing this to people of colored decent, sleep as if nothing had happened to them and they are not even realizing how much hurt they are causing other people.

Discuss the use of imagery in two stories of your choice. How do the various images work in a particular story to bring its subject matter into focus? Is there a central image? And how does this enhance or confuse or complicate the effect of the story?

Sherman Alexie utilizes allusion in order to examine the way persons associate things to both their pasts and their futures when they undergo the process of self discovery. One instance where this can be observed is at the very beginning of the story, when Zits explains his connection to the rock band Blood Sweat & Tears. He explains “I remember my mother and father slow-dancing to that Blood Sweat and Tears song [...] my mother always sang it to me to celebrate my creation” (Alexie 3). In this instance, Zits explains the link between his family and a widely known rock band. Here, Alexie is referencing to something known to the public, the band Blood Sweat and Tears, to exhibit how his narrator takes something from popular culture and makes it part of his past and identity.

Sherman Alexie is an author that writes about Indians, not only in this story but in his other stories and books. It may seem that having only one type of major character limits the ability to have a broad range of story lines. In “What you Pawn I will Redeem” Alexie is able to show that having one type of character does not limit the use of the other elements of fiction. With proper use of irony, point of view, tone, and symbolism Alexie took one major character and turns him into many. Given that Alexie takes the point of view and tone to show that the reader is looking at this story from one side.