The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Bastard out of Carolina

1532 Words4 Pages

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie and Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison, tell stories about troubled adolescents and their desire to live a life more meaningful than the one society had predetermined for them. On the surface, Junior and Bone seem very different but when they are analyzed through the themes of discrimination, poverty, and friendship, these two protagonists become reflections of each other. This paper will compare the struggles faced by the characters and the effects of social inequality on their lives. The struggle to rise above the opinions of others was one of the major problems both Junior and Bone fought to overcome. In the case of Junior, racial discrimination was a constant reminder that he belonged to a low social class. His identity as Native American was a good enough reason for people of other races to look down on him. Stereotypes claimed Native Americans were lazy, uneducated alcoholics who did not attempted to overcome poverty. Due to the years of suppression that resulted from stereotyping, the Indian characters in this novel have a strong sense of hopelessness. The inhabitants of the reservation recognize that it is easier to accept injustice rather than face the adversity that comes with challenging their offenders. When Junior asks his parents which kinds of people have the most hope, without a hesitation they tell him "white people." (p. 45). Throughout the book, Junior comments on the fact that the white people belong to the most prestigious clubs, hold the highest paying jobs, and attend the best schools. The Native Americans assume the easiest thing to do is give up. They have come to believe that success belongs to the whites and that Indian life is sy... ... middle of paper ... ...h his life chances are low, he can still strive for a better life. Unfortunately, Bone experienced such hardship that in the end she stops fighting and accepts the fact that she would not rise to be anything more than she was expected to be, "white trash". The effects of social inequality, poverty, discrimination, abuse, and death effects people differently. Although they started out very similar, by the end of the books, Bone and Junior were at different ends of life. Despite their many similarities, they will grow to be very different people. Works Cited Alexie, S. (2007). The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. New York: Hachette Book Group, Inc. Allison, D. (2005). Bastard Out Of Carolina. New York: Penguin Group. Rothman, R. A. (2005). Inequality and Stratification: Race, Class, and Gender (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, N.J. :Pearson Prentice Hall.

Part-Time Indian Struggles
893 Words | 2 Pages
First, Junior confronts the dreariness of the Wellpinit school system by deciding to transfer to the Reardan school system. Junior initiates this decision when he throws a book across the room upon discovering his mother’s name inscribed inside the cover. His outburst signifies Junior’s recognition of Wellpinit’s misery and desire to achieve. This ambition drives his decisions throughout the novel and defines his unique character. In addition, Junior discloses his decision to his parents with fearlessness and trepidation. Junior confesses, “I want to transfer schools... I want to transfer to Reardan” (Alexie 45). Junior’s bluntness highlights his fearless personality and validates his ability to confront his problems and tasks head-on. In complex situations, Junior possesses the skills to navigate his future. Finally, Junior’s ability to overcome problems appears in his ability to navigate his way to Reardan each day for school. With the uncertainty of gas money in his family, Junior often finds himself walking or hitchhiking to the school, however
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Role of Women in "Kiss of the Fur Queen"
744 Words | 2 Pages
When an individual belongs to two different disadvantaged classes, the risk of abuse and discrimination multiplies. Thus, Native American women are at a very high risk of violence and sexual abuse. As of 2007, “One in three Native American women will be raped at some point in their lives, a rate that is more than double that for non-Indian women, according to a new report by Amnesty International” (Fears and Lydersen 1). This is exemplified in the novel in the rape, murder and mutilation of Evelyn Rose McCrae and Madeline Jeanette Lavoix. There was the possibility of a third assault and it occurs in front of the two brothers on New Year’s Eve. A car full of white men, one of which Jeremiah believes to be in his history class, pulls up in front of a young pregnant woman whom the young men jeer and proposition. All three women were Native American and in seedy neighbourhoods at the time that they were offered a ‘good time’, and the two were assaulted and murdered. The two assaults and murders were perpetrated by young men, and to be assumed as young white men. Through these encounters we can see how Native women were treated in the city as a twofold minority. In the setting of the city, Native American women are treated as lowly sex objects by the young men in all three instances. They had a lower social status as being both women and Native...
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Sherman Alexie: What it means to be an Indian in America
990 Words | 2 Pages
“Dr. Mather, if the Ghost Dance worked, there would be no exceptions. All you white people would disappear. All of you. If those dead Indians came back to life, they wouldn’t crawl into a sweathouse with you. They wouldn‘t smoke the pipe with you. They’d kill you. They’d gut you and eat your heart.”
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The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
1132 Words | 3 Pages
Establishing an identity has been called one of the most important milestones of adolescent development (Ruffin, 2009). Additionally, a central part of identity development includes ethnic identity (ACT for Youth, 2002). While some teens search for cultural identity within a smaller community, others are trying to find their place in the majority culture. (Bucher and Hinton, 2010)The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian chronicles Junior’s journey to discovery of self. As with many developing teens, he finds himself spanning multiple identities and trying to figure out where he belongs. “Traveling between Reardan and Wellpinit, between the little white town and the reservation, I always felt like a stranger. I was half Indian in one place and half white in the other” (p.118). On the reservation, he was shunned for leaving to go to a white school. At Reardon, the only other Indian was the school mascot, leaving Junior to question his decision to attend school he felt he didn’t deserve. Teens grappling with bicultural identities can relate to Junior’s questions of belonging. Not only is Junior dealing with the struggle between white vs. Indian identities, but with smaller peer group identities as well. In Wellpinit, Junior is th...
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Sherman Alexie: The Absolutely True Diary Of a Part-Time Indian Essay
698 Words | 2 Pages
Being unwanted, uncared for, unloved and forgotten by everybody even by your own family is a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat. As the book The absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie talks about an Indian boy, Arnold Spirit, who was born in the Spokane Indian reservation in Wellpinit with brain damage. Arnold takes us along on his journey and we learn how absolutely awful and devastating poverty is and it is not for an individual but for an entire community. This condition leads to senseless death. They never had the chance to be anything but poor and hopeless Indians. If they stop dreaming of being poor and start searching for hope and try to live up with high expectations and accept more to them. They will look to their future with excitement and confidence and begin to do more of what they ever imagined. As a result, they will have a better living condition. Throughout the novel, we learn from Arnold’s fight for a better life. He inspires us and gives us hope. He goes to Reardan where white people live searching for hope. There, he makes new white friends and changes their ideas about Indians. Another inspiration we see in this book is, Mary Spirit, Arnold’s older sister, who leaves her reservation to make her dream come true. She goes to Montana, gets married and starts focusing more on writing her romance novels rather than focusing more on the reservation opinions. Therefore, Arnold’s and Mary’s decision is that they are not simply Indians or White but human being who belongs to many tribes.
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Analysis Of 'The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part-Time Indian'
842 Words | 2 Pages
At a point in time, Arnold and Rowdy become best friends once again. This friendship between Arnold and Rowdy that Alexie has integrated into the novel illustrates a hardship between personal companions and personal prosperity, perfectly. Hardship is everywhere, but Sherman Alexie’s “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian” is an amusing and intelligent novel that clearly provides the reader with perfect examples of poverty and friendship on an Indian reservation. Alexie incorporates those examples through the point of view and experiences of a fourteen year old boy named Arnold Spirit Jr.
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The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
1336 Words | 3 Pages
“I’m never going to act like my mother!” These words are increasingly common and yet unavoidable. Why is it that as children, we are able to point out every flaw in our parents, but as we grow up, we recognize that we are repeating the same mistakes we observed? The answer is generational curses: un-cleansed iniquities that increase in strength from one generation to the next, affecting the members of that family and all who come into relationship with that family (Hickey 13). Marilyn Hickey, a Christian author, explains how this biblically rooted cycle is never ending when she says, “Each generation adds to the overall iniquity, further weakening the resistance of the next generation to sin” (21, 22). In other words, if your parents mess up you are now susceptible to making the same mistakes, and are most likely going to pass those mistakes to your children. In The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie shows the beauty of hope in the presence of a generational curse. Even though the elders are the ones who produce the curses, they are also the ones who attempt to break Junior from their bond forming mistakes. The curses that Arnold’s elders imprint on him lead him to break out of his cultural bonds and improve himself as a developing young man.
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What You Pawn I Will Redeem Analysis
1679 Words | 4 Pages
The story chronicles situations that illustrate the common stereotypes about Natives. Through Jackson’s humble personality, the reader can grasp his true feelings towards White people, which is based off of the oppression of Native Americans. I need to win it back myself” (14). Jackson also mentions to the cop, “I’m on a mission here. I want to be a hero” (24).
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How Does Sherman Alexie Overcome Stereotypes
767 Words | 2 Pages
Growing up on a reservation where failing was welcomed and even somewhat encouraged, Alexie was pressured to conform to the stereotype and be just another average Indian. Instead, he refused to listen to anyone telling him how to act, and pursued his own interests in reading and writing at a young age. He looks back on his childhood, explaining about himself, “If he'd been anything but an Indian boy living on the reservation, he might have been called a prodigy. But he is an Indian boy living on the reservation and is simply an oddity” (17). Alexie compares the life and treatment of an Indian to life as a more privileged child. This side-by-side comparison furthers his point that
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The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part-Time Indian By Sherman Alexie
572 Words | 2 Pages
First, after listening to Mr. P’s advice of leaving Wellpinit for a better education and better future, Junior made the decision of going to Reardon to seek for the “hope”. However, as an Indian, leaving the reservation and go to a school that are full of white kids means that he has betrayed his tribe. Junior clearly knows clearly that if he betrays his tribe, the whole reservation’s people will turn their back on him even his best friends, but Junior wasn’t frightened about the consequences, he took the courageous act of leaving Wellpinit and his decision was proven right in the future. This marked a turning point in Junior’s life and the lights of the hope start to shine on Junior’s journey to success. Second, the first time Junior and Roger met wasn’t pleasant, Roger insulted Junior by nicknaming him the “Chief”, after 112 lost fight, Junior didn’t let the insult go, he chose to fight and go against the massive sports player, Roger. Roger was punched right in the face. As a freshman and newcomer in the
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Native Son Rhetorical Analysis
751 Words | 2 Pages
Intro: Summary, Thesis, Highlighting main points (Text to Text, Text to Self and Text to World) The tale of Native Son by Richard Wright follows the story of a young man by the name of Bigger Thomas who lives in the 1930’s. In the beginning of the story, we meet Bigger a young, angry frustrated black man who lives with his mother, brother and sister in a cramped apartment in New York. The story is narrated in a limited third-person voice that focuses on Bigger Thomas’s thoughts and feelings. The story is told almost exclusively from Bigger’s perspective. In recent years, the
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Sherman Alexie's Indian Education
1266 Words | 3 Pages
Adjusting to another culture is a difficult concept, especially for children in their school classrooms. In Sherman Alexie’s, “Indian Education,” he discusses the different stages of a Native Americans childhood compared to his white counterparts. He is describing the schooling of a child, Victor, in an American Indian reservation, grade by grade. He uses a few different examples of satire and irony, in which could be viewed in completely different ways, expressing different feelings to the reader. Racism and bullying are both present throughout this essay between Indians and Americans. The Indian Americans have the stereotype of being unsuccessful and always being those that are left behind. Through Alexie’s negativity and humor in his essay, it is evident that he faces many issues and is very frustrated growing up as an American Indian. Growing up, 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.
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The House On Mango Street Essay
1031 Words | 3 Pages
Imagine constantly moving from place to place and never been able to consider somewhere “home”, while trying to defy the perception that people have about your neighborhood. Imagine living in an area in where you are discouraged from following your dreams and that you are never allowed to leave this place because everybody will be mad at you or cannot believe you cannot succed. These two stories unfold in The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. The novels describe how young adolescents try to defy their destinies by pursuing the unexpected. The protagonists, Esperanza and Junior, disprove the negative attitudes that others have of them and their cultures by showing
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Part Time Indian Stereotypes
1421 Words | 3 Pages
I can relate to this, not as far as race, but in a different way. At my school, there were stereotypes about the “volleyball girls”, and I was part of the volleyball team. At one point people thought this group of girls was all about partying and not school. Although, I was only focused on school and ended my high school career with only two B’s. Although this is not as an extreme case as Junior, I can still relate. In more of an extreme case, after Junior finally overcame his fear of leaving the reservation for a new and more positive life, he was not treated fairly. In the beginning of his experience at Reardan he writes, “After all, I was a reservation Indian, and no matter how geeky or weak I appeared to be, I was still a potential killer” (Alexie 2007:63). This is a perfect example of how easily people believe things they hear. Junior was literally a weak fifteen year old that could never hurt a fly, yet people looked at him as a killer because that was a stereotype about Indians. This idea goes along with Johnson’s thoughts of symbols, “symbols go far beyond labeling things” and “Symbols are also what we use to feel connected to a reality outside ourselves” (Johnson 2008: 36).
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The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
766 Words | 2 Pages
Junior sometimes had to go to bed hungry, but that wasn’t the worst thing about being in poverty. He made a diary entry stating, “Poverty= empty refrigerator+empty stomach. And sure sometimes my family misses a meal…and hey, in a weird way, being hungry makes food taste better (8).” This really puts the diary reader in his shoes about how many times he had to go without food and starve while trying to go to sleep, simply because his family couldn’t afford it. But to Junior, being hungry wasn’t necessarily that bad. What he felt was the worst thing about his poverty was that there was no money to save his beloved animal Oscar. Oscar became really ill and Junior wanted to take the animal to the doctor, but the family couldn’t afford it. When it came down to it, his father had to put the dog out of misery, and decided to shoot him. Visualizing someone having to shoot your best animal friend is heart wrenching. Most people have been in Juniors shoes where they have a sick animal, however they never imagine having to shoot it. This comparison of being hungry and losing an animal, shows Junior’s great strength at a young age about going through poverty, and sometimes even hope...
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The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Bastard out of Carolina

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