Sherman Alexie
The odds were against Sherman Alexie on that day in October 1966. Not only was he born a minority, but he was also hydrocephalic. At the age of 6 months, he had a brain operation, but was not expected to live. Though he pulled through, doctors predicted he would be severely mentally retarded. Fortunately, they were wrong, but he did suffer through seizures and wet his bed throughout his childhood ("What" 1).
Rather than being called "Native American," which he feels is a "guilty white liberal term," he prefers to be called Indian. He is a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian, in fact, and grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington. To avoid being picked on by the other reservation kids, he spent most of his time indoors, where he developed a love for reading. But as he grew older, alcoholism, which plagues most reservations, found its way to Alexie, and he suffered this disease for five years until he became sober at 23 ("What" 1).
He graduated high school with honors and originally planned to become a doctor until a fainting episode in a Human Anatomy class changed his mind. He attended Gonzaga University on scholarship and graduated in American Studies from Washington State. He then received two consecutive Fellowships in 1991 and 1992, and shortly thereafter wrote six poetry and poem/short story books. Two of these, The Business of Fancy Dancing and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven, earned him literary awards (What" 1). By 1998, his list of accomplishments grew to include Reservation Blues (1995), which earned him Granta’s Best of Young Novelists, the Before Columbus Foundations Book Award, and the Murray Morgan Prize. Indian Killer (1996), his second novel, was The New Yo...
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... reders in and keep them turning pages. He writes so visually that they feel they are actually there with the other characters. But most importantly, his stories make them think, not only about the characters and what is happening to them in the stories, but also about themselves and the world in which they live. His fiction echoes Chinua Achebe’s idea that the strong must listen to the weak. They are stronger in number only, which doesn’t make them right. Those who are outnumbered, the weak so to speak, have something to say. They have a voice that deserves to be heard. Alexie has a powerful voice, and it would do us all good to listen.
Works Cited
Alexie, Sherman. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. New York: Harper Perennial , 1994.
"What it Means to be Sherman Alexie". The Official Sherman Alexie Site. Online. America Online. 8 April 1999.
Franz Kafka’s clear isolation of Gregor underlines the families’ separation from society. In The Metamorphosis, Kafka emphasizes Gregor’s seclusion from his family. However, Gregor’s separation is involuntary unlike the family who isolates themselves by the choices they make. Each family member has characteristics separating them from society. These characteristics become more unraveling than Gregor, displaying the true isolation contained in The Metamorphosis.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968.
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...
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.
James Alan McPherson, an essayist, short-story writer and critic, is among the generation of African American writers and intellectuals who were inspired and mentored by Ralph Ellison. Ralph Ellison was a highly acclaimed scholar and writer. Ellison used racial issues to express universal dilemmas of identity and self-discovery, but didn’t use his writing as a propaganda tool to heighten his people. "Literature is colorblind," he once said “and it should be read and judged in a larger framework.” Many writers disagreed with his beliefs, but McPherson, like Ellison, sees African American culture as integrally connected with the "white" culture. McPherson doesn’t consider himself a "black writer", but rather compares himself to other practitioners of the American short fiction. Even though his writing is drawn from his experiences as a black man, he rejects the notion that black or white fiction must necessarily concern certain black or white topics.
Alexie’s purpose is to communicate to the reader not to believe everything you read. He wants us to question and think deeply whatever we read so far. Alexie does this through the details of his story. It’s the details that separate the real writer from the fake. Alexie shows he is the true writer because he talks about personal aspects of his like on the Spokane Indian reservation. Alexie writes “my story, which features an autobiographical character named Thomas Builds-the fire who suffers a brain injury at birth and experience visionary seizures into his adulthood”. The details that Alexie uses to communicate his personal knowledge of a specific situation. His diction and phrasing speaks to understand the people that he was telling the
DeMyers, Sandra. "Intro to the Hero's Journey." Loyno.edu. Northshore High School, 21 June 2000. Web. 26 Nov. 2013.
“Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.” John le Carr. The novel Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka is a story about the transformation of a man named Gregor who turned into a bug. The story takes place inside an apartment and describes the struggles Gregor goes through with his life and family. Throughout the entirety of the writing he is met with different challenges and obstacles. Grete, his sister and his parents have a unique bond that is not always the strongest. Gregor has not been close with his parents for awhile, but Grete especially at the beginning was the only person who truly cared about his predicament. This conflict results in the desertion of Gregor and the downfall of the family. These negatives compound, causing the his suicide. The Metamorphosis portrays how the betrayal of Gregor and Grete by their parents, and Gregor by his sister, leads to the demise of the family.
Gregor’s relationship with his father shows resemblance to the relationship between Kafka and his father. Kafka, as a child, suffered abuse from his father. Kafka viewed his father as a forceful monster, which resembles Gregor’s father. Gregor wanted nothing more than the love of his family, especially his father, just as Kafka had wanted. His reason for writing “The Metamorphosis” could also relate to the situation which he lived in. He was a Jew raised in Austro-Hungarian Empire, modern day Czech Republic. He was a Jew in an area of the world which Jews were not well accepted. Gregor was described as cockroach, something that Jew were often equated to during this time period. Jews were treated like vermin, they were thought of a creature that was to be rid of. Gregor experienced similar treatment from his family. They discussed leaving or getting rid of Gregor during the story. Experiences of Gregor are similar to those that Jews would have experienced during Kafka’s life. “The Metamorphosis” could also demonstrate the issues that normal people face every day. People face trials and tribulations every day that change their lives dramatically, nobody has ever been transformed into a bug, but it does represent the extreme circumstances that may
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.
The term, progress, is synonymous with phrases that denote moving forward, growth, and advancement. It seems unorthodox then that Ronald Wright asserts the world has fallen into a progress trap, a paradox to how progress is typically portrayed as it contradicts the conventional way life is viewed: as being a natural progression from the outdated and tried towards the new and improved. Wright posits that it is the world’s relentless creation of innovative methods that ironically contributes to the progress trap rather than to progress itself, the intended objective. Wright’s coinage of the term “progress trap” refers to the phenomenon of innovations that create new complications that are typically left without resolve which exacerbate current conditions; unwittingly then, matters would have been much better if the innovation had never been implemented. In his book, “A Short History of Progress,” he alludes to history by citing examples of past civilizations that collapsed after prospering, and ones that had longevity because they avoided the perilous progress trap. Wright recommends that societies of today should use indispensable resources, such as history, to learn and apply the reasons as to why certain societies succeeded, while also avoiding falling into the pitfalls of those that failed, the ones that experienced the progress trap. This can easily be interrelated with Godrej’s concept of “the overheated engine of human progress,” since humans for centuries have been risking environmental degradation for progress through ceaseless industrialization and manufacturing. This exchange is doomed to prevent improved progress and will lead to society’s inevitable decline since it is unquestionable that in the unforeseeable future, cl...
The evolution of technology has been hand in hand with the human subjugation of earth, but the question persists, when does the use of technology go too far? Advances in medical science have tremendously improved the average human lifespan and the quality of life for individuals. Medical science and biology are steadily arriving at new ways to make humans superior by the use of advanced genetic alteration. This ability raises the question of how ought this new technology be used, if at all? The idea of human enhancement is a very general, since humans are constantly “enhancing” themselves through the use of tools. In referring to human enhancement, I am specifically referring to the use of genetic intervention prior to birth. Julian Savulescu in his, “Genetic Interventions and the Ethics of Enhancement of Human Beings” argues that it is not only permissible to intervene genetically, but is morally obligatory. In this paper I will argue that it is not morally obligatory to genetically intervene, but may be permissible under the criterion established by Savulescu. I plan to argue that the argument used by Savulescu for the obligation to genetically intervene is not the same obligation as the prevention and treatment of disease. The ability for humans to genetically intervene is not sufficient to provide a moral obligation.
What does The Metamorphosis. suggest about caring, patience, communication, love, loyalty, shame, secrecy, duty in the context of family life?
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 1949. Novato: New World Library, 2008. Print.