Sherman Alexie Indian Identity

The novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, written by Sherman Alexie and illustrated by Ellen Forney, is a bestselling winner of several awards that covers a lot of important and polemics themes, such as racism, bullying, violence, poverty and prejudice. Despite that, the literature is easy to read and funny, the subjects are shown lightly, making the readers think critically about them without big difficulties. Based by Alexie’s own experiences, the story is a first-person narrative about a fourteen-years-old teenager called Arnold Spirit or “Junior” who lives in a Spokane Indian reservation. Contradicting all the expectations on him, Junior leaves the reservation to study in all-white school to improve his chances to achieve

All of us belong to a society that commonly tries dictate how we should behave, think, what to believe, it implicitly creates stereotypes for everything. Furthermore, the worst part of this is that society dictates the limits for people, what people are not able to do and achieve because of factors such as, education, economic level, race, etc. All of these expectations influence on identity formation, because the reality and common sense are part of the identity. As an illustration, follows a part of book: “But we reservation Indians don’t get to realize our dreams. We don’t get those chances. Or choices. We’re just poor. That’s all we are. [...] Poverty doesn’t give you strenght or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.” (Alexie 13). After read this quote readers can realize how the societal expectations affect negatively people’s perspective about their future and their chances because of the actual reality. Indians from Junior’s reservation do not have any perspective about a better life or thinking to leave the reservations because the societal expectations are just about they continue to be poor and they grow up absorbing this idea and making it part of their

Each kind has a purpose, although, all of them make people think of different ways. Of these kinds, two types can make we understand better how things work, ourselves and the actual world where we live: technical and novel books. Technical books help us how things work because are more specific, have exactly the information that readers need. They are more efficiently when the objective is learning. They can help readers mainly on school and college. As an illustration of this, in Brazil on college, most students of Computer Science or some major related to Information Technology needs to read the book Modern Operating Systems by Andrew S. Tanenbaum. This book has the necessary content for students understand the subjects easily. Novel books really help readers to understand themselves and the world because usually they are about one or more main characters that have a interesting story that happens in some moment and place in history. So this kind of book have three parts with which readers can make connections: characters, situations and background. When people make connections they can understand themselves better and see their characteristics and situations through the book. To illustrate this point, the book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian was read by the students of BSMP (Brazilian Scientific Mobility Program) and everyone made connections with the character Junior, because