In books these days, it’s usually very hard to connect to the main character. Either the character will be a complete goody two-shoes, or the character is hardly described, which makes it difficult to imagine what the character looks or acts like. However, this is not the case with Sherman Alexie’s novel The Absolutely True Story of a Part Time Indian, as the author’s writing style is very effective at making the main character very relatable to the reader, and describing the main character and his surroundings. The book follows Arnold Spirit (also referred to as Junior), a teenager living in poverty on a Native American Reservation, who is seeking a better education and a better life than the people there. This seems unrelatable at first, mainly because a lot of the readers wouldn’t be at his level of poverty or in his situation, however, the author makes the character very easy to relate to. Sherman makes Arnold’s dialogue very realistic and relatable through the
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The other way that Sherman’s writing is effective is that he makes it very easy to visualize Arnold and his surroundings without the use of illustrations (although there are illustrations in the book). “And I started wearing glasses when I was three, so I ran around the rez looking like a three-year-old Indian grandpa. And, oh, I was skinny. I’d turn sideways and disappear. But my hands and feet were huge. My feet were a size eleven in third grade! With my big feet and pencil body, I looked like a capital L walking down the road.” (3). This quote obviously makes it quite easy to imagine what Arnold looks like, which is very skinny with extremely out of proportion hands and feet. Ergo, the writing style of Sherman Alexie is very effective at making Arnold very relatable to the reader, and at describing the main character and his
The other way that Sherman’s writing is effective is that he makes it very easy to visualize Arnold and his surroundings without the use of illustrations (although there are illustrations in the book). “And I started wearing glasses when I was three, so I ran around the rez looking like a three-year-old Indian grandpa. And, oh, I was skinny. I’d turn sideways and disappear. But my hands and feet were huge. My feet were a size eleven in third grade! With my big feet and pencil body, I looked like a capital L walking down the road.” (3). This quote obviously makes it quite easy to imagine what Arnold looks like, which is very skinny with extremely out of proportion hands and feet. Ergo, the writing style of Sherman Alexie is very effective at making Arnold very relatable to the reader, and at describing the main character and his