Overcoming Ideas In Sherman Alexie's Superman And Me

812 Words2 Pages

Life can have lots of obstacles. Some good and some bad. To better your life, you need to learn to overcome those obstacles. “Superman and Me” by Sherman Alexie introduces that you have to push towards the goals you want in life, which will bring success and joy in the future.

No matter of the chances, you have to push towards what you want. This story talks about how he first learned how to read, his intelligence as a young Indian boy, and Alexie as an adult as an teaching creative writing to Indian kids. “I learned to read with a Superman comic book. Simple enough, I suppose. I cannot recall which particular Superman comic book I read, nor can I remember which villain he fought in that issue. I cannot remember the plot, nor the means by which I obtained the comic book. What I can remember is this: I was 3 years old, a Spokane Indian boy living with his family on the Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern Washington state. We were poor by most standards, but one of my parents usually managed to find some minimum-wage job or another, which made us middle-class by reservation standards. I had a brother and three sisters. We lived on a combination of irregular paychecks, hope, fear and government surplus food”(paragraph 1). In the first paragraph, Alexie explains that he first learned to read with a Superman comic book. But before he could read the comic, Alexie taught himself about paragraphs and how they relate to the real world. He thought of everything as paragraphs such as his reservation he lived on was a paragraph to the United Sates. Or his family as a essay of paragraphs, each family member being a paragraph. He taught himself how to read the text by looking at the pictures and dialogue and pretending to say aloud what h...

... middle of paper ...

...hough there were a lot of odds against him, Sherman Alexie pushed towards what he really wanted. Life can have a lot of obstacles, but you have to find ways to overcome them. You also have keep on fighting. It doesn’t matter what people tell you, if you believe in something it will happen. This story is truly inspirational. Unlike many of the other Indian children, Alexie refused to fail in school. No child anywhere should give up at all and always have this kind of a attitude. The kids were expected to fail, but Alexie was one of the few to not live up to those expectations. Alexie read everything and everywhere he went. This is probably one of the reasons Alexie never failed in school, because he loved to learn, he wanted to be smart. A lot of people can learn from him. Life is whatever you make it, so make wise choices, and don’t let any obstacles hold you back.

Open Document