The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time is about a boy is living on an Indian Reservation in Washington state. This boy's name is Arnold Spirit or Junior. He and his family are fighting poverty, education deprivation, and a hopeless future for their son. It seems that Arnold does not have a chance to break this vicious cycle. His helplessness is not helping make his life change. He is staying in an unwanted cycle of poverty. Until one of his teachers makes him realize that he does have a future. He just needs to make it happen. There for Arnold changes his current state by going into a new world and opening up new opportunities for his future. Throughout Arnold's life, He and his family have been struggling with money. His dad is an alcoholic and spends all the money on drinks and not on helping the family (pg.13). On the other hand, he is always there for his family. On pages 7-14, Arnold is telling his feelings about being poor and how he is coping with it. He is talking about the bad things about being poor is, one if the biggest problems are being hungry and only getting sleep for dinner. One more problem is not being able to pay medical …show more content…
Throughout this novel, Arnold has been given the challenge of finding out who he is as a person and what his future will entail. On page 40, he is given an idea from one of his teachers about changing his future and opportunities. Arnold takes in all the information that his teacher has given him and used it. On page 46, he shares this idea with his parents. He tells them he wants better opportunities and a better future, for hope. His parents accept his wishes and let him go to an all white school outside of the reservation, Reardan high school. Before this, he was stuck in the cycle of poverty and helplessness. Until he had the courage to change it by going to Reardan. Ultimately Arnold was able to change is future and opening up a better
Encountering struggles in life defines one’s character and speaks volumes about their strength, ambition, and flexibility. Through struggles, sacrifice, and tragedy, Junior in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie, adapts to survive difficult situations and faces his problems head-on. As he makes life changing decisions, adapts to an unfamiliar culture, and finds himself amongst misery and heartbreak, Junior demonstrates resilience to overcome adversity and struggles.
To represent a way he overcomes obstacles in basketball is when Arnold says, “I don’t know what happened. But for once, and for the only time in my life, I jumped higher than Rowdy. I rose above him as he tried to dunk it. I TOOK THE BALL RIGHT OUT OF HIS HANDS!” (192) This represents overcoming obstacles because Arnold had to work hard to be more exceptional than Rowdy. He also had to overcome being the underdog on the basketball team and an underdog in the all white school. Arnold was able to overcome being the underdog in both situations. He even overcame being one of the underdogs on the reservation who would get bullied. At the very ending of the book Arnold gets his best friend back, even though Rowdy may be angry and want Arnold to go to school with him Rowdy lets it go.
It can be hard to live in high poverty and come out and be highly successful, but the author Wes proves it can be done. I also think this book shows how important it is to make good life choices and to listen more to your parents when growing up, so you don’t stray on the wrong path in life.
The protagonist understands how to be independant but recognizes that others do not have that skill and dependance is also within human nature.The characters realize that there home is a tough place to live and are mostly self-sufficient, they don't blame the ones who are not.
In conclusion, The Baker family went through a lot through the great depression, and it affected there lives in many ways that they thought it wouldn’t. This autobiography on the troubles him and his family faced during the Great Depression. During the Depression, the major problems that Baker faced through the novel were about the financial difficulties that his family endured, ending in result of his father passing away, the struggles of moving from rural life to urban life, and the lack of Medical attention around the area. During the depression, in Morrisonville there was a common occurrence as many towns people died from common illnesses like phenomena, or whooping cough. This book has much to offer to teenage readers who are interested in the story of one individual’s growth, development, and struggles of his life in the Great Depression.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie is a novel about Arnold Spirit (Junior), a boy from the Spokane Indian Reservation who decides to attend high school outside the reservation in order to have a better future. During that first year at Reardan High School, Arnold has to find his place at his all-white school, cope with his best friend Rowdy and most of his tribe disowning him, and endure the deaths of his grandmother, his father’s best friend, and his sister. Alexie touches upon issues of identity, otherness, alcoholism, death, and poverty in order to stay true to his characters and the cultures within the story. Through the identification of the role of the self, identity, and social behavior within the book, the reader can understand Arnold’s story to a greater depth.
However, his medical condition also acts as an anchor, allowing the reader to get closer to Arnold’s character. Without a personal connection, readers may not relate or comprehend any of Arnold’s experiences. Using the first person perspective from Arnold’s character gave Alexie an advantage and made the novel more appealing to readers. The setting of the tale takes place in two towns in Washington, Wellpoint (Reservation) and Reardan (Arnold’s New High School).... ...
Growing up Aron had everything going for him; Adam sees this as an ambition within Aron and “wish[es] Cal had some ambition” (484). Having ambition is to have a goal. While Aron’s goal is to graduate and go to college, he feels like it is more of a responsible rather than a goal in the end. As for Cal, he lets passion drive his future. Instead of going to college like his father wanted him to, he took his passionate emotion to do business with Will. In the end, Cal is more satisfied with his actions than Aron; because while Aron’s having a miserable time in college, Cal feels a sense of accomplishment by obtaining $15,000. Being passionate led him to do a good deed and good deeds make up for the bad sins letting him become purer. His passion leads him to have redeeming
In Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, the main character Arnold, also known as Junior, has many health issues, and notably stands out in the crowd. It does not help that he is a poor Indian boy that lives on a reservation, and that he decides to go to an all-white high school. Many of his experiences at school, and on the Reservation, impact his identity. Experience is the most influential factor in shaping a person’s identity because it helps gain confidence, it teaches new things, and it changes one’s outlook on the world.
The mothers, Mary and Joy, push their sons to achieve an education in different ways. Mary, Other Wes’s mother, enrolls him in public schools and expects him to take control of his life and work hard. This arrangement does not work favorably; Other Wes stopped attending to school two years before he graduated high school. He eventually received his GED from Job Corps. On the other hand, Wes’s mother, Joy, enrolls her son in private school to avoid the public schools in the area. First, she sends him to Riverdale. Wes hates it there. He got suspended numerous times and let his grades slip. He was in charge of his own fate at Riverdale, but he botched it up. Finally, Joy sends Wes to military school. He is given a second chance, but “by the end of the fourth day at military school, [Wes] had run away four times” (90). Eventually, after an abrupt phone call, he agrees to stay. He embraces military school, and thrives there. He has the chance to escape Other Wes’s fate, which even Wes agree could have been his own. He may have had no choice but to leave to military school, but his success there is up to him. While Wes was sent away to avoid the ghetto’s problems, Other Wes is right at the center of
By the end of the book, Arnold experiences a lot of deaths of people who mean a lot to him but he still found hope. Arnold becomes a warrior for leaving the reservation and going to Reardan. Although there is hardly any hope on the reservation, Arnold knows that there is hope outside of the reservation. The reservation has a horrible education and on page 3 when Arnold was at school Arnold says, “My school and tribe are so poor that we have to study from the same dang books our parents studied from.”
To begin, the narrator discovers the fact that he has been and will be stuck in poverty for the rest of his life. When the young man went to the market to buy an attractive girl he liked a pot, he discovered truly just how simple he has been living his whole childhood. You see the young woman said she could not come with him on his adventure so he said to her that he would bring her something. When he got on the train, he strugg...
In actuality this is not true; the author does his best in the beginning of the story to point out that the people living on the rez are poverty stricken. The narrator refers to his home as a “poor-ass Spokane Indian Reservation” when first mentioned in the book (Alexie 7). The book begins by giving us a description of the main character Arnold who had many issues growing up. One problem he had faced was that he had too many teeth. The book tells how the dentist on the reservation only works once a year which means Arnold had to get all his extra teeth pulled at the same time. The author uses this background information on the main character to symbolize poverty on the reservation. This is just an example of the things this town does not have the luxury of having. It’s clear that many people hear struggle. Arnold says “the reservation is meant to be a prison” in the sense that they are isolated from the real world (Alexie 216). Not only are they struggling but they believe struggling is normal. The poverty that the Spokane people face goes un-talked about because to them poverty is the norm that everyone deals
Mr. Day’s family’s life was full of hard work. They strived to stay ahead and give to the children. The times were rough for the family but Mr. Day did not have to suffer. Mr. Day came from a low-income family but they appeared to be proud and instill that sense of pride in Mr. Da...