Sherman Alexie's Subtle Sarcasm Essay

Alexie's father was the reason he began to read which later became his passion. His father loved to read, and even though they did not have a ton of money, his father went out of his way to stock up on books. One-day Alexie decided to pick up one of his father's books and taught himself how to read. Before that, he had never read a book and could not even understand the words. A paragraph intrigued him; each house on the reservation was a paragraph, and each member of his family was a paragraph. The family members were separate people; however, there were still related making all of them together an essay. Then there was the Superman comic book he picked up one day. Although he could not read the panels of words the illustrations told the story. He would make up a story to go with the pictures and pretend to read the panels. Looking back at these times Alexie realized how lucky he was growing up with all these resources to teach

They carry neither pencil nor pen. They stare out the window. They refuse and resist.” When Alexie was their age, nobody bothered to teach him because he is also Indian. He is trying to tell them that being Indian does not affect intelligence, and Alexie is proof

As a Native American himself, Alexie can prove and show people some stereotypes about Natives that are true. Some people however, would say that stereotype are just a way for people to judge others. By thinking this, people don't see that even with the name stereotype they are in fact true. In the story “What you pawn I will redeem”, there are stereotypes that people see and would automatically associate with Indians like, be are very bad at spending the money wisely. Alexie showed people this stereotype when he said, “I sold five in one hour, dumped the other forty-five in a garbage can, and walked into McDonald’s, ordered four cheeseburgers for a dollar each”. In this situation, Jackson Jackson had just made money by selling news papers,

The key rhetorical device that Alexie used was pathos in order to cause the reader to feel some emotion of pity, sympathy, and sorrow. This is used towards the middle when he explains the struggle he had to face at a young age when teaching himself how to read and explains how others thought of Indians with this capability, he then writes, “A smart Indian is a dangerous person, widely feared and ridiculed by Indians and non-Indian alike. They wanted me to stay quiet

While Alexie states his voice by using metaphor, he emphasizes the meaning of reading repeatedly in his essay. He stresses how he strives to read variety of books, and he records that,” I read the books my father brought home from the pawnshops and secondhand. I read the books I borrowed from the library. I read the backs of cereal boxes… I read magazines. I read anything that had words and paragraphs” (18). Alexie lists out all the material he has read with the same sentence structure, yet he does not conclude all these things in one sentence. He exemplifies his passion to reading, for he tries to save his life. Due to his parallel repetition, Alexie impresses the audience by these

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.

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.

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.

The narrator encounters racial stereotypes throughout the novel. He first encounters Tod Clifton selling Sambo dolls on the streets. Clifton is singing a jingle trying to promote the dolls:

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.

Living Outside the Normal Expectations: How a Single Book Can Chang Your Life. It is funny how something as simple as a heroic picture book can alter someones life. Such as what Sherman Alexie a Author and spokesman who has wrote about his experience in the essay of " The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me". with in this article Alexie explains his life as an impoverished native american boy teaching himself to read.

At the very end of the poem both Alexie and the man were stopped at a light. But, they both ended up going different directions. Alexie did not do anything about the man and came to realize that there is nothing that he could have done. This man is already the way that he is and there's nothing that alexie could do about that. The last stanza of the poem states "why do poets think they can save the world? The only life I can save is my own.” What Alexie means by this, is that many people think that they can do things that isn't in their power to do. Some people are just the way that they are. Even if Alexie were to have said something to the man or tried to fix the problem, the man will never be fixed from the way that he is. How does he know he won't continue to do it again. In this poem, there was only so much that he had control of, and that was going home and doing something that he was good at, in the process of helping other people remember the same thing. He couldn’t save the man but he could consider to change himself. I think that this relates thoroughly to Alexies home life. Alexie had no control over the family that he was brought into let alone the type of parents that he was conceived from. With his mom gone most of the time due to work, and his dad being absent due to his alcohol addiction, Aleixe was forced to figure out his life pretty much on his own. I think that this poem really describes

 Joseph Heller's narration, dialogue, and characterization in Catch-22 all create a unique perspective of war and our society's bureaucracy. The satire, sarcasm, irony, and general absurdity of the novel provide a view of the irrationality of man's behavior. The horror that is portrayed in Catch-22 is intensified by the humorous way in which it is portrayed. Distortion and exaggeration highlight the characters and scenario while magnifying the confusion. Parallel structure and repetition serve to reinforce the novel's themes.

At a young age Alexie came across to comic books, and at three he started to read them. Although, Alexie came from a poor indian family, he was always surrounded by his father’s books. In which as a result, he started to learn a lot about reading and writing. Personally, I think it’s amazing that his background, economic status and age didn’t push him back from doing what he enjoyed. The importance that Alexie had in paragraphs is wonderful, the way how he connected them to fences, and that everyone and everywhere has their own paragraph. Over all, I think Alexie is an individual that doesn’t hold back from showing who he really is, for example when he was the only one in his classroom who didn’t hide his knowledge. Because all of his indian