Part Time Indian

Survival is a very important part of any life and survival is a culmination of all the driving forces behind our success. The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part Time Indian explores this concept closely. This exposition will be arguing that survival is in fact a large part of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and shows that through many different facets, it will also be showing some examples of this and defining further how this correlates to this concept.

The book shows how being different, like Gordy and Junior are, can limit your chances. Junior is bullied just because he is not of the same race as the rest of the people in the school. He is the only Native American in the school. He is different, and this limits his chances. As Junior’s friend Gordy said, weird people still get banished. Junior was shunned by about the entire school when he first got there. The article was very similar, in the making clear that the Indians were determined different, and their chances were being limited because they were on the rez, separated from the rest of society. This relates to Junior because he was considered different by the rest of the school because he lived on the rez. All things considered, the article and the book are very similar, in that they both show that people who are different don’t have as many chances as someone who is considered normal by

In Sherman Alexie’s novel “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” the narrator portrays both internal and external conflicts throughout his journey to success. Arnold Junior Spirit is a fourteen-year-old boy who believes that in order to pursue his dream he will have to choose between staying in his Spokane Indian reservation or moving out to an all-white school in the neighboring farm town. But things aren’t as easy as they seem when Junior tries moving schools because he know has to be part of two communities. Many conflicts form within the Spokane Indian reservation and the Spokane Indian reservation as well comes into conflict with the white community.

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.

Adjusting to another culture is a difficult concept, especially for children in their school classrooms. In Sherman Alexie’s, “Indian Education,” he discusses the different stages of a Native Americans childhood compared to his white counterparts. He is describing the schooling of a child, Victor, in an American Indian reservation, grade by grade. He uses a few different examples of satire and irony, in which could be viewed in completely different ways, expressing different feelings to the reader. Racism and bullying are both present throughout this essay between Indians and Americans. The Indian Americans have the stereotype of being unsuccessful and always being those that are left behind. Through Alexie’s negativity and humor in his

Junior goes so far to use the hyperbole of a magic trick to obtain something so insignificant to the rest of the society such as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or a couple twenty dollar bills. Furthermore, it is evident that the Junior endures the some of the most harsh states of poverty in the reservation because when Junior mentions that only magic can get him a small amount of food, the audience can tell that the poverty that Junior experiences are so severe, that Junior and his family experiences difficulty get some of the basic human needs such as food. In other words, Junior constantly battles hunger due to poverty. Junior struggles through poverty after he leaves the reservation. In an illustration on page 88, Junior draws a comic that displays his weekly routine to get to school. In this comic, Junior explains how he struggles to get to school because his family is too poor to afford gas or properly working car. Junior’s comic also shows how he frequently resorts to hitchhiking or even walking miles to get to school from the reservation. Yet again, the comics that Junior drew exemplifies how Junior finds it extremely difficult to do something as simple as getting a ride to school. In addition to the poverty the Junior faces at the reservation, Junior finds it difficult to keep his poverty a secret from his white peers at his new high school. An illustration on page 120, displays a comic that shows

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.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a book about a young boy just entering high school who leaves his best friend and family to go to school mostly occupied by white people. This whole book follows him through his first year in this school where he tries to get a better education than he can get on the Rez, in the hopes that he will one day get off that reservation and out of his soul crushing poverty. “The Absolutely True diary of a Part-Time Indian” ATD, Sherman Alexie uses unfortunate events, social class and conversations to show that not everyone gets the support they need to follow their dreams.

In ''The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian'', Arnold spirit, who is an Indian boy, lives on a Spokane Indian Reservation with alchoholic parents. Adding to that, he is a hydrocephalic, which has affected his speaking ability and he had to deal with being bullied and getting picked on in school. However, he wants to overcome these challenges and move on in life to something better, because he is dissatisfied with the situation he is in. Later in the story, he decides to go to a white school where he begins feeling like a part-time indian.

Going into Reardan as an Indian, people thought of Junior differently and therefore treated him differently. He is viewed differently because people believe that the whites are better and wealthier than the Indians. Junior explains to his friend Gordy that “...some Indians think you have to act white to make your life better. Some Indians think that you become white if you try to make your life better, if you become successful” (Alexie 132). Junior may be Indian physically, but that does not mean that he does not have the same traits and should not be treated different than any other white person at Reardan. Additionally, Junior’s classmates started of thinking of Junior as a weak individual because of his skin colour. Junior’s classmates think it is alright to call Junior names because of his physical appearance but “weak and poor and scared, [Junior] let them call [Junior] names while [Junior] figured out what to do..So [Junior] punched Roger in the face” (Alexie 64/65). Junior proves his classmates wrong when they think that he is too scared to pick fight with them when in reality, Junior had the guts to punch Roger in the face. Junior clearly proves how his physical appearance does not define his strength or power. Junior should be treated equally and not judged based on his race because that does not define who he is as an

This book, "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian" by Sherman Alexie, is about a boy called Arnold Spirit aka Junior. He is a Native American that lives in an Indian Reservation. He isn't really satisfied with his life, since he's pretty poor, but he gets along. He doesn't really accept himself, since he has multiple medical problems, and he has been beaten up since he was little. When he starts to gain more friends in this new (American) school, he starts to like and accept himself more than before. In this book, "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian" (by Sherman Alexie), the main theme is about Arnold trying to accept himself.

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

Over the course of your life, you come to struggle with the philosophical idea of personal identity; the thing that makes you, you. Oneself may shape their identity around aspects of their life that they have no control over like race and physical traits, as well as decisions that are made throughout their lives like affiliations and religion. Your personal identity can be seen through your passions and interactions with others. An individual’s search for their identity is something that may occur in everyone’s’ life. In the novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie highlights the theme of how the search for identity is always prevalent, through the conflicted characters of Junior and Mary throughout the novel.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie is a novel about Arnold Spirit (Junior), a boy from the Spokane Indian Reservation who decides to attend high school outside the reservation in order to have a better future. During that first year at Reardan High School, Arnold has to find his place at his all-white school, cope with his best friend Rowdy and most of his tribe disowning him, and endure the deaths of his grandmother, his father’s best friend, and his sister. Alexie touches upon issues of identity, otherness, alcoholism, death, and poverty in order to stay true to his characters and the cultures within the story. Through the identification of the role of the self, identity, and social behavior

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian is a novel for young adults by Sherman Alexie, illustrated by Ellen Forney and was published in September 12, 2007. This novel is a first person narrative by a Native American teenager Arnold Spirit Jr, also known as Junior. In this essay I will be emphasising mainly on the root cause of physical and psychological violence in the text and how Arnold represents and comes to terms with violence in his life. Junior is a 14 year old budding Indian cartoonist who lives in the Spokane Indian Reservation and schools at the reservation.