In Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Alexie channels his voice through Junior, a poor young boy living on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Alexie writes of the impacts of poverty to himself and to an unnamed audience in the form of a diary. The author adopts a bitter and hopeless tone to tell the story of a hot July day when his dog, Oscar, fell ill.
Alexie’s inclusion of specific details demonstrates his feelings of resent towards him and his family having their potentials stifled by their poverty. Alexie writes “Given the chance, my mother would have gone to college…She’s a human tape recorder. Really, my mom can read the newspaper in fifteen minutes and tell me the baseball scores, location of every war, the …show more content…
Alexie uses the repeated sentence fragments “Nothing. Nothing. Nothing” to emphasize how helpless Junior feels. Repetition is used to emphasize the fact that Junior has nothing, he can do nothing, and he can feel nothing. The sentence fragments are intense and heavy, and hit the reader with the immense emptiness that Junior feels in his poverty. Instead of writing “I could do nothing” just one time, Alexie takes Junior’s helplessness and multiplies it. By fragmenting and repeating the feeling, he gives it much more power. Alexie uses these impactful and hard-hitting fragments in order to exemplify Junior’s deep hopelessness and powerlessness. Furthermore, Alexie writes “I wanted to punch my dad in the face. I wanted to punch him in the nose and make him bleed. I wanted to punch him in the eye and make him blind. I wanted to kick him in the balls and make him pass out”, using anaphora to stress how Junior is filled with longing for a different life; for the power to change his current situation and save his best friend. Junior wants and wants and wants, and but he can’t have what he wants: to live out of poverty. By repeating that he wants but can’t have what he wants, it emphasizes how resentful this makes him. Alexie uses anaphora in order to capture Junior’s bitterness in not being able to get what he wants (a wealthy life) and the hopelessness he feels in not being able to do anything to change his life of devastating
Alexie’s inclusion of specific details demonstrates his feelings of resent towards him and his family having their potentials stifled by their poverty. Alexie writes “Given the chance, my mother would have gone to college…She’s a human tape recorder. Really, my mom can read the newspaper in fifteen minutes and tell me the baseball scores, location of every war, the …show more content…
Alexie uses the repeated sentence fragments “Nothing. Nothing. Nothing” to emphasize how helpless Junior feels. Repetition is used to emphasize the fact that Junior has nothing, he can do nothing, and he can feel nothing. The sentence fragments are intense and heavy, and hit the reader with the immense emptiness that Junior feels in his poverty. Instead of writing “I could do nothing” just one time, Alexie takes Junior’s helplessness and multiplies it. By fragmenting and repeating the feeling, he gives it much more power. Alexie uses these impactful and hard-hitting fragments in order to exemplify Junior’s deep hopelessness and powerlessness. Furthermore, Alexie writes “I wanted to punch my dad in the face. I wanted to punch him in the nose and make him bleed. I wanted to punch him in the eye and make him blind. I wanted to kick him in the balls and make him pass out”, using anaphora to stress how Junior is filled with longing for a different life; for the power to change his current situation and save his best friend. Junior wants and wants and wants, and but he can’t have what he wants: to live out of poverty. By repeating that he wants but can’t have what he wants, it emphasizes how resentful this makes him. Alexie uses anaphora in order to capture Junior’s bitterness in not being able to get what he wants (a wealthy life) and the hopelessness he feels in not being able to do anything to change his life of devastating