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Impact of literature on society
Impact of literature on society
The influence in literature
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Sherman Alexie’s Indian Education focuses his attention on three main points and uses character, setting, and ambiguity to write his story. Alexie focuses on one main character, himself, while also focusing on the setting of his school off the reservation. He uses ambiguity to make his story complex and gives a broad spectrum of meaning for his words, which flows perfectly throughout his story. The story showcases each grade of Alexie’s school life and explains the challenges he had to face through life while attending school, which was not common where he was from.
When talking about character, Sherman Alexie is very indirect. He does not plainly state how his character is, but rather explains him throughout the story through his actions,
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In Alexie’s story case, the character is himself. Alexie does a very good job about hitting all the main nine points (Writer’s Digest) a character should have in a story and keeps his story interesting through …show more content…
He does a great job at explaining the chain of events that went on with his life while he went to school off the reservation. He uses character, setting, and ambiguity to do so. The character that he focuses on is himself, and he portrays himself through select dialogue to give his reader a good sense of who he is as a person. He stands out more than any other character that he tells the story because he decided to change his life around and attend school off of his reservation, which was not normal. The school he attends is the main setting of his story and plays a big role. The school shapes Alexie into the character he is and almost acts as a character itself in the story. Alexie's use of ambiguity makes his story more complex and more unique than most stories. It grabs the reader's attention and allows for a broad meaning of what he is trying to say. Ambiguity gets the reader thinking but can also leave the reader confused. But I believe that Alexie’s use of ambiguity is the perfect portrayal of how Alexie is as a person. Sherman Alexie’s Indian Education is the perfect bibliography of his life and the events that take place in
Sherman Alexie was a man who is telling us about his life. As an author he uses a lot of repetition, understatement, analogy, and antithesis. Alexie was a man of greater words and was a little Indian boy at the beginning of the story and later became a role model for other boys like him who were shy and alone. Alexie was someone who used his writing to inspire others such as other Indian kids like himself to keep learning and become the best that they can be.
“I refused to fail. I was smart. I was arrogant. I was lucky.” As a kid Sherman Alexie grew up on a reservation for Indians. He was mostly expected to be stupid as every other Indian kid, but he wasn’t he was actually very smart. He taught himself how to read and write by using a comic book. This comic book was about Superman. He would use the pictures and the captions to put together what they were making out. So that’s how he learned to read and write.
In this essay, McFarland discusses Native American poetry and Sherman Alexie’s works. He provides an overview of Alexie’s writing in both his poems and short stories. A brief analysis of Alexie’s use of humor is also included.
Imagine growing up in a society where a person is restricted to learn because of his or her ethnicity? This experience would be awful and very emotional for one to go through. Sherman Alexie and Fredrick Douglas are examples of prodigies who grew up in a less fortunate community. Both men experienced complications in similar and different ways; these experiences shaped them into men who wanted equal education for all. To begin, one should understand the writers background. Sherman Alexie wrote about his life as a young Spokane Indian boy and the life he experienced (page 15). He wrote to encourage people to step outside their comfort zone and be herd throughout education. Similar to Alexie’s life experience, Fredrick
Sherman Alexie grew up in Wellpinit, Washington as a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene tribal member (Sherman Alexie). He began his personal battle with substance abuse in 1985 during his freshman year at Jesuit Gonzaga University. The success of his first published work in 1990 incentivized Alexie to overcome his alcohol abuse. “In his short-story and poetry collections, Alexie illuminates the despair, poverty, and alcoholism that often shape the lives of Native Americans living on reservations” (Sherman Alexie). When developing his characters, Alexie often gives them characteristics of substance abuse, poverty and criminal behaviors in an effort to evoke sadness with his readers. Alexie utilizes other art forms, such as film, music, cartoons, and the print media, to bombard mainstream distortion of Indian culture and to redefine Indianness. “Both the term Indian and the stereotypical image are created through histories of misrepresentation—one is a simulated word without a tribal real and the other an i...
Alexie shows a strong difference between the treatment of Indian people versus the treatment of white people, and of Indian behavior in the non-Indian world versus in their own. A white kid reading classic English literature at the age of five was undeniably a "prodigy," whereas a change in skin tone would instead make that same kid an "oddity." Non-white excellence was taught to be viewed as volatile, as something incorrect. The use of this juxtaposition exemplifies and reveals the bias and racism faced by Alexie and Indian people everywhere by creating a stark and cruel contrast between perceptions of race. Indian kids were expected to stick to the background and only speak when spoken to. Those with some of the brightest, most curious minds answered in a single word at school but multiple paragraphs behind the comfort of closed doors, trained to save their energy and ideas for the privacy of home. The feistiest of the lot saw their sparks dulled when faced with a white adversary and those with the greatest potential were told that they had none. Their potential was confined to that six letter word, "Indian." This word had somehow become synonymous with failure, something which they had been taught was the only form of achievement they could ever reach. Acceptable and pitiable rejection from the
In "Indian Education" by Sherman Alexie, the story is about our narrator of the story Victor. Telling the sad, miserable cruelty and the emotions that his fellow students and teachers gave him from 1st grade all the way through 12th grade. The meaning of this story at first seems the most current for kids in school; bullying each other and calling each other names but the story goes much deeper than that. It shows a reality of the life on the reservation and how the education system is terrible and demeaning to other children who are considered soft spoken. Two pieces of dialogue that were the most interesting to me happened to be "Give me your lunch if you're just going to throw it up," because it ends with the sentence "There is more than one way to starve.
Alexie Sherman, a boy under an Indian Reservation that suffers from bullying since the 1st grade, who would have a hard time being around white people and even Indian boys. US Government provided him glasses, accommodation, and alimentation. Alexie chose to use the title "Indian Education" in an effort to express his internalized feelings towards the Native American education system and the way he grew up. He uses short stories separated by the different grades from first grade to twelfth grade to give an idea of what his life was like. He seemed to have grown up in a world surrounded by racism, discrimination, and bullying. This leads on to why he chose not to use the term Native American. He used the term "Indian" to generate negative connotations
He wanted a chance to have more opportunities than what was given to him on the Indian Reservation. The structure of Alexies piece was specific and purposeful due to the fact that it truncated his life into years; the years of education. The audience is aware of the thematic shift in the seventh year when he “.kissed the white girl” (Alexie). The shift between his time on the reservation and his resilience through taking matters into his own hands despite the backlash he received through growing up. Alexie knew that he didn’t want to leave his culture behind, but it was something that he had to do in order to change his life and take charge of it like an “Indian” would do.
Picture yourself in a town where you are underprivileged and sometimes miss a meal. In the novel, “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” Sherman Alexie wrote the book to show hardships that Native Americans face today. Alexie shows us hardships such as poverty, alcoholism and education. In the novel, Junior goes against the odds to go to an all white school to get a better education to have a better life
...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.
It was dangerous, according to societal standards, to be an educated Indian, or even an educated minority. In a society where you were destined to fail it was not abnormal for Alexie not to be recognized. The children knew they would be ridiculed so they would play the role of the dumb Indian while at school. Outside of school they would display themselves to be more educated than they gave themselves credit for. This behavior was widely expected of Indians and accepted by non-Indians: everyone but Sherman Alexie. His motivation to succeed encompassed his life, in high school he chose public schools over the reservation. Sherman Alexis still suffered from the same ridicule but the difference between him and his peers is that he would not let that interfere with his objective to prove to the society that Indians can be educated,
As an American Indian boy growing up with stereotypes and challenges already against him, Sherman self motivates himself to learn, and this leads
Overall, Alexie clearly faced much difficulty adjusting to the white culture as a Native American growing up, and expresses this through Victor in his essay, “Indian Education.” He goes through all of the stages of his childhood in comparison with his white counterparts. Racism and bullying are both evident throughout the whole essay. The frustration Alexie got from this is clear through the negativity and humor presented in the experiences he had to face, both on and off of the American Indian reservation. It is evident that Alexie faces discrimination from white people, who he portrays as evil in every way, to show that his childhood was filled with anger, fear, and sorrow.
In conclusion, Sherman Alexie created a story to demonstrate the stereotypes people have created for Native Americans. The author is able to do this by creating characters that present both the negative and positive stereotypes that have been given to Native Americans. Alexie has a Native American background. By writing a short story that depicts the life of an Indian, the reader also gets a glimpse of the stereotypes encountered by Alexie. From this short story readers are able to learn the importance of having an identity while also seeing how stereotypes are used by many people. In the end of the story, both Victor and Thomas are able to have an understanding of each other as the can finally relate with each other through Victor's father.