Poverty is everywhere; it’s in your backyard, at the front of your door, it can even be in your very own home. In Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, poverty is the most important theme in the book because it negatively influenced Junior’s life. Poverty is the main theme because it affected Junior’s decisions, his family, and the whole Indian community. First of all, poverty was already in Junior’s family.
Being poor can affect you in many ways, but poverty affected Junior’s family because they couldn’t afford anything. They didn’t have enough money since his dad usually gambles most of their money away. They couldn’t afford to buy food because they lived in a Spokane Indian Reservation. They couldn’t take Junior’s best friend Oscar, his dog, to the hospital. They could barely afford to buy Junior new clothes. “I wish I were magical, but I am really just a poor-ass reservation kid living with his poor-ass Spokane Indian Reservation” (7). Poverty means that you’re poor and when you’re poor you have to starve. Poverty made Junior lose his best friend. Poverty made his family and him suffer for not having enough money. Junior wished he was magical because his family and him barely had enough food to eat. What Junior meant by magical is he wished he could just change things with a snap of a finger. After Oscar died Junior wanted to blame his parents for Oscar’s death but he couldn’t. Junior couldn’t because him and his family have a history of being poor, and they can’t help it. They can’t change the past but they didn’t know that they can change the future. Junior’s ancestors were poor and now Junior and his family is poor. “And it’s not like my mother and father were born into wealth. It’s not like they...
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Poverty is the most important theme in Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, because it affected Junior’s life in a negative way. Poverty is the main theme because it affected the whole Indian community, Junior’s family, and Junior’s decisions. Poverty can affect you in many ways but to Junior, his family, and the whole Indian community in the reservation, poverty was a life threatening problem to them. Even so, poverty is a repeating cycle that will continue until you step out of that cycle and decide for yourself that that’s not the path you want to take. Poverty can happen to anyone, and everyone will experience poverty at some point. It’s up to you to decide whether you want to stay in poverty or not.
Works Cited
Alexie, Sherman. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
New York: Little Brown. 2007.
David K. Shipler in his essay At the Edge of Poverty talks about the forgotten America. He tries to make the readers feel how hard is to live at the edge of poverty in America. Shipler states “Poverty, then, does not lend itself to easy definition” (252). He lays emphasis on the fact that there is no single universal definition of poverty. In fact poverty is a widespread concept with different dimensions; every person, country or culture has its own definition for poverty and its own definition of a comfortable life.
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 conclude, in the book The Absolutely True Diary of A Part-Time Indian an Indian boy shows how to escape the poverty of his Indian Reservation by going to a wealthy white school, as well as keeping his Indian Culture alive when living on the reservation.
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In conclusion, sometimes actions take place that changes a person’s outlook on life and as you can see poverty is one that can have a huge effect on not only one person, but also the people around him/ her.