Depending on who you are, we all react differently to negative events in our life. For me, I go into a state of shock and can not focus on the positive aspects of my life after a tragic event. For many other people, they may go into a drinking spree or start abusing drugs to numb the pain. But for those like Junior in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, they channel their negativity into something that is positive and productive. In this story, Junior surpasses the sorrow of losing his three precious family members by receiving support from his family and friends, and carrying beneficial qualities such as resilience, ambition, and confidence.
For Junior, his ambition was what drove him to move to Reardan High School to attain a better education. In the beginning of the story, he shows a huge amount of this characteristic when he explains to us that he draws cartoons because he thinks that it will give him a chance to escape the reservation. It makes him feel important and is a huge part of who he is as an individual in the reservation. He also showed this quality when he decided to switch schools and attend Reardan High to improve his life. Although his Geometry teacher helped nudge him in the right direction, it was
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Junior displays this aspect of himself through how he reacted to the loss of three beloved family members. After his grandma died, he was grieving peacefully along with the rest of his tribe, laughing and crying as they slowly buried her (Alexie, 166). When his dad’s best friend, Eugene, died he felt just as “helpless and stupid” as anyone else would. However, he does not go through the pain from losing his family members and friends alone as he still has support from other family members and friends, which influences his decisions and allows him to be resilient and have hope for the
This rhetorical analysis will bring you through the "How to Fight Monsters" chapter of Sherman Alexie 's story : An Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian. This book is a semi-autobiography that won the 2007 U.S. National Book Award For Young People 's Literature. This story is about an Indian boy from a poor reservation with an alcoholic father, who wishes for a better life. In order to achieve this better life, Junior decides to move to another school in order to have " hope" for his future. During this transition into his new school Junior is marked as a traiter and looses the one close friend he had on the reservation. At the opening scene of the story Junior is asking his parents "who has the most hope?" In his desperate
College and life beyond the reservation was a distant dream due to poverty. Junior and his family live in poverty, along with most of the residents of the reservation. The school Junior originally attended, Wellpinit High School, was outdated and could not support someone who dreamed of leaving the reservation for
Friendship Do you remember how you became friends with your friends? I met my friend at the end first grade, she was the new kid and was sitting alone at lunch. I sat with her and from that day on we were friends. The novel The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part-Time Indian (ATD) is about a kid named Junior who moves out of the school on the rez to go to a white school in Reardan.
Junior the protagonist of True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie is currently struggling with an abundance of issues ranging all the way from a poverty driven home to medical issues he was born into. It seems to me, that all of juniors problems he was born into and unable to change for example he was born into poverty and he was born indian, setting him up for the racism he would soon enough face and he was born with too much cerebral fluid in his brain. That's not to say all of his problems came along with birth and he was just born to be plagued with, but majority of them stemmed from birth.
The upshot of all this is that, Junior’s decision about leaving the Rez and moving to Reardan for a better education was tough. He faced lot of problems; he felt lonely because of losing his best friend, and afraid of death of his tribe and family. Although he suffered from the entire bad things that happened to him, it was the best decision that he had made for his life. “I realized that I might be a lonely Indian boy, but I
Poverty hits children hardest in the world. When I was younger, the Armenians had faced the hard facts of poverty after they break up with the Soviet Union, war with Azerbaijan, and a devastating earthquake. My family moved into our motherland Armenia while our nation was going through these huge dramatic changes. Furthermore the poor economy and inflation destroyed numerous hopes and futures. In the novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie, Arnold Spirit, describes his hardships involving poverty living on Spokane reservation. The people on the reservation are stuck in a prison of poverty. They are imprisoned there due to lack of resources and general contempt from the outside world, so they are left with little chance for success. Like Arnold, I also went through hardships regarding poverty and education.
As time flew by, everyone that meant so much to Junior had passed away. Both Junior’s
After exiting on 175, you cross State and Main Street. Lurking off in the distance is one of two large scoreboard screens with the block M and blue painted on it. Downtown Ann Arbor was as busy as a bee. There is nothing like gameday in this city. Every single place is filled with people all wearing the colors of maize and blue. Sidewalks in this city are lined with every shop open selling anything with the block M on it. The smells of every kind of barbeque you can imagine fill the air from everyone tailgating.
Junior begins to realize that he’s not inviable and that he belongs to a lot of things near the end of the story. Along with that, he also is emotionally affected when he talks about his love for drawing cartoons. As Junior starts to reflect upon his life he thinks, “I realized that, sure, I was a Spokane Indian. I belonged to that tribe. But I also belonged to the tribe of American immigrants. And to the tribe of basketball players” (Alexie 217). At this moment in the book, Junior's improved analyzing skills come into play and he himself proves that he isn’t nothing. Junior tells himself that he matters, which improves his emotional being for the better. Secondly, right at the beginning of the book when Junior talks about how he likes to draw cartoons, he states, “So I draw because I feel like it might be my only real chance to escape the reservation” (Alexie 6). As Junior speaks about himself he states that cartoons are a way for him to avoid all the emotional stress put on him by others, but also when he says this, it resembles a self-fulfilling prophecy. As he thinks like this, he starts to believe that cartoons are his only real escape, which shows once again how emotionally affected he is by his own actions. Therefore, it’s shown that Junior puts his own toll on himself emotionally through self-fulling prophecy when he talks about drawing cartoons,
Junior may have lost some people from his life but he gained much more. Missing school for over fifteen days, Junior returned to school after Eugene’s death. When his teacher mocked him in class he did not stand up for himself because he was joyless and broken. Instead, it was his friends who had defended him. Gordy who defended him first “stood with his textbook and dropped it”(175). After Gordy’s act, all of their classmates began to feel inspired by Gordy’s courage that they all dropped their textbooks and walked out too. Junior had friends outside of the reservation who are there for him even if he was different. He felt joy and hope again with the help of his friends. When his sister passed away, he decided to go to school because everyone
1. In the beginning of the book, Junior explains that he was "born with water on the brain". Junior has brain damage from surgery he went through to remove fuild in his brain, this left Junior with many physical problems: He has forty-two teeth, is skinny, has an over-sized head, hands, and feet, has poor eyesight, experiences frequent seizures, stutters, and lisps. (Page) These problems also caused him to be bullied by other kids on the reservation, Junior is beaten up and given names such as "globe" and "retard" making fun of his physical difference. To add to this his family like most of the reservation is extremely poor. They show this when Junior's adopted dog Oscar begins to suffer from intense heat exhaustion and Junior's father is forced to kill Oscar with a rifle to avoid having to pay the expensive veterinary treatment necessary to save him. (Page) This scene gives Junior and the people on the reservation immediate character with telling very much about them. It lets the readers sympathetic with Junior making the actions that he does later in the book more meaning-full to the reader.
I have always had an interest in animals, having grown up alongside multiple pets; they have always been a part of my life. However, it wasn't until our beloved family dog fell ill with cancer that I began to realise the huge impact that a vet can have on the lives of both animals and humans and, I too, wanted to be able to help the lives of not only animals, but also the people who love them. My desire to study veterinary science was reinforced during my first work experience at a small animal practice, Vets4Pets. I witnessed several operations, from spays and castrations, to multiple dental procedures and a tumour removal from a Labrador.
Throughout the story, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, Junior goes through many ups and downs. This story is about how Junior, an indian from the Spokane reservation, decides to go to Rearden, the school for non-indians because of how run-down his school is and has trouble fitting in. Some of the ways Junior dealt with those downs include his uncanny sense of humor, his love for his friends, and the want to fit in and prove he’s just as good as everyone else at his new school.
"Double-consciousness this sense of always looking at one 's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one 's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity" (Dubois, 8). W.E.B. Du Bois had a perfect definition of double-consciousness. The action of viewing one 's self through the eyes of others and measuring one 's soul. Looking at all of the thoughts good or bad coming from others. This is present in the main character of the book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie. The Absolutely True Diary is about a boy named Junior that is fourteen years old and living on the Spokane Reservation. Junior was born with too
In the Latin American story, The Third Bank of the River, written by João Guimarães Rosa, a man leaves his family to live his life sailing back and forth on a river for years to come. His son, the main character, never accepts his father leaving the family. Years later when the other siblings have grown old and have children of their own, the son is still living in the house near the river and when his dad finally acknowledges him after years of ignoring anyone who tried to get his attention, he flees, leaving the story with an open ended conclusion. The use of magical realism is present in this story through symbolism and takes interpretation to understand the meaning behind the text. Magical realism is an author's way of using real world issues by incorporating an element of unearthly events such as magic. In The Third Bank of the River, the author uses symbolism, a warped time frame, and human reaction as metaphors for real life events.