How Does Sherman Alexie Contribute To The Writer Behind Smoke Signals

Plenty of teenagers read books every day for entertainment and for school. But they don’t just read for amusement or that they need it for their classwork, they read because it is what they go to when things turn rough. Like what people said, books are a powerful thing, it can be hopeful and scary. Sherman Alexie is a wonderful writer, poet, and has published plenty of novels and short stories. Sherman Alexie’s purpose of writing is to give teenagers hope that things would work out alright, although it might be rough from time to time, and he also uses humor to entertain his readers. He provides teenagers things that they can relate to, and he addresses many crucial issues in his works. He uses numerous amount of stylistic techniques in his

In Sherman Alexie's "Why the Best Kids Books Are Written in Blood", Alexie refutes a claim, which argues how his books are "distorted" portrayals of young adult life. Alexie begins by reiterating conversations he had with students about their past traumas. He uses these conversations and the students' reactions to his work to challenge a claim made by Meghan Cox Gurdon, who called his works '"hideously distorted portrayals' of contemporary young adult literature"(1). Alexie retaliates by arguing young adults who have experienced traumatic events cannot be protected. To further expand on the topic, he uses his history of sexual and physical abuse to show the absurdity of her claim. Alexie provides his own theory by stating critics are trying

They are also Sherman's way to express the strong frustrations and many issues he experienced growing up as an American Indian in the school system. In the eighth grade chapter, for example, he suddenly jumps from his rather funny remark to the anorexic school girl to give him her lunch because she "is just going to throw it up anyway" to the grim reality his family is facing at home in their limited choices of food and concludes the chapter with "There is more than one way to starve." Other remarks are quite glum such as the one at the end of the sixth grade chapter where his lesson learned is that in the white world it is better to "always throw the first punch." I do not feel Alexie is speaking literally but uses more of a hyperbole styled text to get his points across. One of his main points of the story I interpreted was that he just wanted to inform people of what he went through, along with also showing his family and friends on the reservation what he did to be successful to encourage them to do the

In a Bill Moyer’s interview “Sherman Alexie on Living Outside Borders”, Moyer’s interviews Native American author and poet Sherman Alexie. In the Moyer’s and Company interview, Alexie shares his story about the struggles that he endured during his time on a Native American reservation located at Wellpinit, Washington. During the interview, Alexie goes in-depth about his conflicts that plagued the reservation. In an award-winning book by Sherman Alexie called “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”, Alexie writes semi-autobiography that reveals his harsh life on the reservation through a fictional character named Arnold Spirit Junior. In Alexie’s semi-autobiography, Alexie shares his struggles of a poor and alcoholic family, the

Authors write for many reasons; most often because they want to tell a story. This is definitely the case with Sherman Alexie, “a poet, fiction writer, and filmmaker known for witty and frank explorations of the lives of contemporary Native Americans.” He grew up on the Spokane and Coeur D’Alene Indian Reservations, and has devoted much of his adult life to telling stories of his life there. Alexie expertly uses language and rhetorical devices to convey the intensity and value of his experiences.

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.

Alexie’s narrator describes a story of assumption and discrimination through not only the thoughts of the narrator and his life, but also how the narrator explains his thoughts and the diction he uses as he recalls certain moments. Throughout the passage, the narrator demonstrates how isolated he is, not only in the country where hia people are shunned, but also with others that are in a situation similar to his. Not only is there a feeling of loneliness and isolation, but also guilt of relation to how Indians are being treated today. Through stories of realistic fiction, Alexie addresses serious issues that others fail to.

In the essay “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me,” Sherman Alexie credits learning to read a Superman comic book with saving his life. As an Indian boy growing up on a reservation in Spokane, Washington, where being uneducated was not the exception but the rule, Alexie was given few opportunities to succeed. The Superman comic book was the book he taught himself to read with, which in turn saved him from going down a path that lead to a the life of inferiority and failure. Learning to read gave him the confidence to break down a door that had previously prevented Indians from succeeding as well as the driving force that allowed him to persevere against the adversity he faced. The significance of Superman is carried on

Row, in “ Without Reservation” emphasizes that Alexie is a storyteller and not a prose fiction writer. A story teller, he defines, has work that, “... contains, openly or covertly, something useful …” (Row 1). Row goes on by giving evidence to why Alexie is a storyteller, and not your usual Indian writer. As he explains, Alexie reinstates the fragmented and ruptured Indian life instead of the political topics associated with them. With this idea in mind, Row believes that Alexie instills this behavior in his writing to give way for his sharp moral endings. These genuine moral endings, installment of stereotypes and Indian beliefs with consequences

Reading was his outlet from the negative environment he grew up in, but also the way out. Sherman Alexie also uses selective diction to shape the struggles of young Native Americans in the broken school system. Words like sullen, defeated, resist, refuse and arrogant create the negative atmosphere of the Native American students are face with everyday. Discouraged and already defeated students are the kind Sherman Alexie tries to save because nobody bothers with them, a lost

Alexie uses first hand experiences all throughout his article to depict the reality of American Indian’s lives. By appealing to the pathos, he gives his readers the ability to empathize with him, experiencing both the trials and triumphs. His use of analogies provides his audience with visuals that portray his experiences more accurately. When Alexie writes about himself in

Before reading this book, I honestly knew little about Native American. I knew that many lived on reservations, but I knew nothing about those reservations. By being brutally honest, Sherman Alexie provided incite to how the everyday life of a teenage Native American is like. This book opened my eyes to the problems that Native American’s face, that I was in the dark about before.

The next idea that Sherman Alexie answers is what is like to be an Indian Man in the short story “An Indian Education” it seems as if to be an Indian man is to be caught between two worlds and sometimes picking one over the other. For example, the passage on page 176 states the following: “But on the day I leaned through the basement window of the HUD house and kissed the white girl, I felt the good-byes I was saying to my entire tribe” (176). For the narrator of that section he felt like had to give up the Indian part of him because of kissing the white. He felt he disappointed his people and they would never for give him for it. He felt as if his tribe would see him as ‘sell out’. There is also a question of did he view himself the same way. The narrator continues state “After that, no one spoke to me for another five hundred years” (177). Sherman Alexie allow the narrator to end that section with a Hyperbole for added meaning. While we know the narrator was not alive for five hundred years, but it could have felt that way for him. He could have thought that everyone hated him or saw him in a negative light. “Amusement” has great examples of how the main character thinks what is like to be an Indian Man.

In Sherman Alexie’s novel The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven shows the struggles of daily Native American life, which is shown through the point of view of male character. All though out the book the following three questions appear: ‘What does it mean to live as an Indian in this time? What does it mean to be an Indian man? and What does it mean to live on an Indian reservation?’ Alexie uses literary devices such as point of view, imagery, characterization to make his point that the conflict of being an Indian in the U.S. in these short stories using the following short stories “An Indian Education” and “Amusement”. “An Indian Education” uses both imagery and characterization to show us what the narrator is

In "Superman and Me", Sherman Alexie uses personal stories and repetition as two very strong writing tools. Both writing tools are very different in nature, but Alexie uses them to create similar responses from his audience. Personal stories and repetition can be used to evoke emotions from his audience that help establish a connection between the reader and writer. The fact that Alexie uses both writing tools to do this shows the impact he wanted to leave on his audience. He did not want this piece to just be informative, he wanted this piece to be emotional and he wanted his reader to catch a glimpse into the emotional whirlwind that is growing up on a Native American