Sherman Alexie Essay

Composition 1 9 Nov. 2017 Malcolm X Versus Sherman Alexie What would you do if you could not read? What problems do you think you would come across? After reading Malcolm X’s “Learning to Read” and Sherman Alexie’s piece, “Superman and Me”, these are a few questions that a reader might ask themselves. Sherman Alexie and Malcolm X are both great writers. This was not always the case though. Malcolm X and Sherman Alexie taught themselves how to read. Alexie at a young age Malcolm X, as a young adult

Sherman Alexie, An Na, and Nick Hornby, through their own different versions of the novel, introduce to readers, respectively, prominent male characters of varying ethnicities. Despite differences in background, personality, and ethnicity, we see commonalities in how each character represents masculinity; throughout these three unique stories we see one common story of toxic masculinity coming from both marginalized and prevalent ethnicities. These manifestations of masculinity are expressed by the

The novel Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie depicts Indians within the reservation struggling with their past. These people include Junior and Victor who are "Two of the most accomplished bullies of recent Native American history." (Page 13) Their past, outlook on life and relation with other people lead them to be friends who are in pursuance to cause mischief in the reservation. Victor is a struggling young man who grew up with a mother and a white stepfather. Given this, his identity crisis

poverty, it was very hard for one to focus on their education and the importance of reading. Sherman Alexia’s purpose in “ I was trying to save my life,” “ They are trying to save their live,” and “ I am trying to save our lives,” was informing his readers of the challenges he faced as a young Indian boy that was not supposed to be educated by societies standards.

Sherman Alexie writes in his story, What You Pawn I Will Redeem about a homeless Salish Indian named Jackson Jackson. Alexie takes readers on Jackson’s journey to acquire enough money to purchase back his grandmother’s stolen powwow regalia. Throughout the story, Jackson’s relationships with other charters ultimately define his own character. Alexie, a well know Native American author tells an all too common tale of poverty and substance abuse in the Native American community through his character

In the short stories “A Drug Called Tradition,” “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor,” and “The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore” collected in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, author Sherman Alexie uses humor to reflect the life on the Spokane Reservation. In “A Drug Called Tradition,” the story starts with a joke by having Thomas sit down inside a refrigerator in response to Junior’s comment as to why the refrigerator is empty. The Indians are

The Truth According to Who Writer Sherman Alexie and director Chris Eyre explore the relationship between truth and fiction in storytelling and the complexities of the Indian oral tradition in the movie Smoke Signals. The movie Smoke Signals follows two young Indian men, Victor and Thomas, on a journey to Phoenix, AR. to pick up the ashes of Victor’s father. Along the way many stories are told and truth is often hard to detect. Sherman Alexie and Chris Eyre reveal subtleties important to the understanding

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

Sherman Alexie’s “Green World” recounts his experience with twelve windmills during the Second Great Depression. An old man acquired a grotesque job on an Indian reservation. His job consisted of him driving to the windmills and cleaning up the dead birds. When the first snow occurred, he witnessed quite a sight with twelve distinct bloody circles of dead birds caused by the windmills. While caught in his gaze at the reservation, an Indian approached him, and he was held at gunpoint. The Indian shot

In Sherman Alexie’s, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven the author grabs the attention of the reader when he focuses on moments of racism and discrimination of Indian characters, these situations can be applicable to modern day American society. In the collection, Alexie depicts the life of several Indian’s lives, living on the Spokane Indian reservation many of whom face discrimination on a daily basis. The ideas behind the bigotry in the assortment of stories are backed by Alexie’s