Analysis: I Was Born With Water On The Brain

Junior is hyper-conscious of his place within any social group. In addition to his awareness of what it means to be white versus what it means to be Indian, he worries about how to be a man (when men can cry, when boys have to stop holding hands with their friends) and how to fit in as a “freak” who is bullied by his peers and even by some adults. Beginning his story “I was born with water on the brain” (a reference to his own disability of hydrocephalus) and identifying his tough, hot-tempered best friend Rowdy as being “born mad,” Junior puts an emphasis on how people’s traits at birth define their characters, suggesting the he initially holds a slightly reductive vision of identity that doesn’t change much over time. However, by the time he gets to know Penelope, a girl at the Reardan high school who becomes Junior’s “almost-girlfriend,” he’s begun to see this kind of thinking as childish, finding it a bit melodramatic when she …show more content…
This decision, which some Indians on rez see as a choice to become white, calls his identity into question and leaves him with two names: on the reservation, he’s Junior, but when he goes to school in Reardan, people start calling him Arnold. At one point Penelope calls him “the boy who can’t figure out his own name.” Metaphorically, figuring out his own name—who he is, what his goals are, the kind of man he will become—is the goal of Junior’s decision to go to school in Reardan, and one of the driving forces in this coming-of-age novel. By the end, he realizes that his identity is really composed of allegiances to many tribes—“the tribe of basketball players … the tribe of cartoonists … and the tribe of boys who really missed their best friends,” to name a few—and that the fact of belonging to so many different communities, even the community of lonely people, means that he is going to be