Sherman Alexie

Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian touches on many issues faced by many modern-day Native Americans throughout their lives, one such issue being poverty, which appears to be present in most Indian families. The sort of poverty that plagues the Spokane reservation is the same kind that has plagued Native Americans for generations. One possible root cause for the situation would be that the current natives on the reservation see that their parents couldn’t do anything…

Frederick Douglass: Learning to Read and Write Learning to Read and Write by Frederick Douglass is an account of what it was like to gain knowledge after being a slave in 19th century America. He speaks of his life as a young slave trying to learn how to read and write without a teacher. He touches on how learning the power of knowledge would at times feel like it “had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given [him] a view of his wretched condition, without the remedy” (Douglass). This…

In Sherman Alexie’s Story, This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona, Victor is a complex character in ways. On the outside he is more closed off and and tries to act “normal” and that he is above others who aren’t in that definition of normal. But on the inside he knows that he shouldn’t be like that. He holds regret for treating Thomas Builds-the-fire the way he does growing up. They were friends when they were younger, but by their teenage years Victor had drifted away. One night, “when…

In the poem How to Write the Great American Indian Novel, Sherman Alexie writes about the necessities when writing an “American Indian” novel. The poem specifically states everything the novel is supposed to have, and how the characters are supposed to look (with few exceptions). The irony with this poem is the more American than Indian vision of the novel. As well as worshipping white culture and caucasian skin or ‘white people’ instead of the Native side of the ‘Indian American.’ Alexie’s poem…

be solved, or simply to entertain a specific audience. Sherman Alexie, a prominent Native American author from a reservation in Wellpinit, Washington, is renowned for his works of this type. He often writes about the struggles of adolescent Native American boys, specifically their struggle trying to fit in and succeed in the world. In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,” Alexie creates young Native American male characters with a…

Alexie vs Douglass Growing up, kids are given opportunities to gain knowledge when they hit a certain age to go to school. Going to school to get an education is something most, if not all parents want for their child. Every parent wants the best for their child in any way possible, to be accepted for who they are and to learn to the best of their ability like every kid their age. However, in this day and time there are many families with children that are not as privileged…

Sherman Alexie’s “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” is a 1993 short story that looks into the life of a Native American man who is depressed after a failed relationship with a white woman in Seattle, now living alone in the Spokane Indian Reservation and feels haunted by his past. Sherman Alexie characterizes the narrator with point of view—the narrator’s perception of others and their own onto his perception of self, character—through the narrator’s identity as a Native American…

your life” (Alexie 136), as Sherman Alexie would say, something that makes you feel “truly free” (X 125), as Malcolm X would express it, and something that can change your way of life entirely as Sandra Cisneros tried to tell us in her story, Straw Into Gold. Education is something that everyone needs to face the world. And teacher many times try to “wake students up to the realities of the world” (Bissinger 121), as Dorothy Fowler tried doing in Friday Night Lights.…

The One and Only Nomad The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie resembles a native American boy, named Arnold, who decides to change his fate and leave his reservation school and go to a rich white school to become more than someone who just stays on the reservation his whole life. Alexie shows that bullying is humiliating and sometimes soul- crushing, but if you keep your hopes high you will eventually overcome it. Arnold gets bullied on the reservation and bullied at…

“I am smart. I am arrogant. I am lucky. I am trying to save our lives.” Sherman Alexie says these words in an article he wrote to persuade his target audience to see how learning to read and write can be a beneficial part of education for not just the indians in his tribe but for all cultured, lower-class. “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me”, was published in the Los Angeles Times. This magazine is available for everyone to read. However, the target audience leans more towards the…