Literary Criticism Essay for the Absolutely True Diary

For the last couple of weeks, we have been reading Sherman Alexie’s semi- autobiographical novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and examining it through a number of critical “lenses.” In this essay, you will elaborate on one of these lenses.

This essay will be a 5-6 paragraph critical review of the book. You must have a thesis, supporting body paragraphs that link directly to the thesis, and a conclusion that wraps up your ideas. Your thesis must address one of the lenses we have used to discuss the book: Marxist, Biographical, or Reader Response (see the other side of this sheet for reading and writing strategies).

Remember that a good thesis must be clear, debatable, and narrow in order to give your essay a good backbone. Because this is a critical review, your thesis should essentially either recommend a book, or warn readers away from it based on the type of criticism you choose. You should imagine that this will be published in a newspaper for the public to read—your teacher is NOT your audience.

You will be graded on the 6+1 traits, as per usual, but in this case the ideas score will include the following:

 A thesis that gives a potential reader of the book some idea of its quality  Examples from the book, or from research (especially for Biographical)  Summary is avoided, and instead unique ideas and interpretations are the focus  A review of the book through a particular lens: o For example, a Marxist criticism thesis might say that the book is worth reading for people of all classes because it challenges some of the stereotypes that exist about Native Americans. (And the supporting body paragraphs would then need to cover social class, power, and money related stereotypes, and give examples of how the book could change someone’s ideas about those things).

The organization score will include paragraph cohesion, meaning that all your body paragraphs need to work together to support your thesis and prove that the book is or is not a good one. This means that you will need to have quotes from the book and other examples and evidence to prove your point. YOU WILL BE REQUIRED TO CITE ALL YOUR SOURCES. Even if your only source is the book, you will be expected to use in-text citations whenever you use a quote, and all papers will be expected to have a Works Cited page that shows where the quotes came from. Lens Assumptions: Reading Strategies: Writing Strategies: Marxist *Karl Marx said that economic factors *Explore how groups of people are *Create a thesis that makes a claim about (money/ poverty) influence the way portrayed. how people of various social classes are people think. *Evaluate level of social realism (is it portrayed in a text. *Groups who owned / controlled major realistic?) and how society is portrayed *Explore and explain the level of social industries could use the rest of the —Are stereotypes about class upheld, realism, and how stereotypes about population. or are they challenged? social classes are either upheld or *Through conditions of employment, *Look at power drawn from social or challenged. forcing their values onto others. economic class *Find examples of how money and *Applies social and economic ideas to *Examine how a text reveals the social power are used (or ignored) in a texts. ideologies of the author in regard to text. social power and capitalism. *Explore the author’s ideology by examining the text: what does it reveal about his or her beliefs? Biographical *Authors write what they care about and *Research the author’s life and relate *Compare and contrast the author’s life know well. The events of their lives are that information to the text and the main character in order to show reflected in their works *Research the author’s time (books how his or her life affected the story. *The context for a work includes published at the time, historical events, * Explore how the text reveals the information about the author’s life, way of life, etc.) author’s thoughts and feelings about his historical events at the time, information or her life by using examples from the available/ social norms at the time. text and comparing them to his or her *The context can give insight into real life. themes, references, social movements, and the creation of characters. Reader *An author’s intentions aren’t available *Read in slow motion, describing the * Explore your own personal Response to readers– all you have is the text response of an informed reader at connections to the text. How does it *Readers make their own personal various points address things you care about? How does meaning from a text, unique to them. *Describe your own, personal response it make you feel? Does it remind you of *Responding to a text is a process, and to the text anything? descriptions of that process are valuable *React to the text as a whole, *Describe how much the text agrees or *Personal responses: How do you read? embracing the subjective, unique, clashes with your view of the world, and What goes on in your mind when you personal response it brings out in you. what you consider right and wrong. read a text? Do you create images? *Explore how much your views were Imagine things as video? Hear the challenged or changed by this text, if at character’s voices? Talk to the author? all. Criticize the characters or the writing? Articles & Reviews – The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie [Postcolonial Review] By Neel Mukherjee http://www.neelmukherjee.com/articles/the-absolutely-true-diary-of-a-part-time-indian-by-sherman-alexie/

The works of the half-Native American writer Sherman Alexie, chosen as one of the top 20 American writers under the age of 40, in the first list compiled by Granta for the USA in 1996, offer a view of American life that is almost absent from contemporary fiction. They give us the true subaltern’s voice in the white colonisers’ language, an insider’s account of a unique postcolonial experience largely missing from the vast, burgeoning literature of and about it. In his first young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Alexie tells the autobiographical story of a fourteen-year-old Spokane Indian, Arnold Spirit, aka Junior, attempting to rise above the blighted life he is born into in the Wellpinit Reservation and make it in the wider white world and the fallout from this act.

Arnold is born hydrocephalic and an early surgery to correct this leaves him with a few problems. But nothing compares to the misery and the absolute dead-endness of the life that is the Indians’ lot in a rez: poverty, endemic alcoholism, absence of every possible opportunity, a crushing collective lack of self-worth … it is small wonder that Arnold, who is bright, spunky, and discontent with the cards handed him by life, seeks to go to the nearest white school, Reardan, twenty-two miles away, and get himself a leg-up in life. Dire consequences ensue. His best friend, Rowdy, becomes his enemy overnight and the rez community treats him as a kind of outcast for this seeming act of betrayal. Things at Reardan are no better to begin with: Arnold faces the typical racism that is marked for a native from a rez. To make things worse, he has a crush on the most beautiful (white) girl in school, Penelope. Assimilation does occur and baseball inevitably helps with it. But things back at the reservation go from bleak to hopeless.

It is a shame then that this tale of chutzpah and the indomitable human spirit should be marred by mawkish self-pity, a grinding stylistic repetitiveness, a tone of breathtaking condescension, and the fakest 14-year-old’s voice imaginable.

Book Review: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie [Reader Response by http://thebooksmugglers.com]

Author: Sherman Alexie / Art by Ellen Forney Publisher: Little, Brown (US)/Andersen Press (UK) Publication Date: Re-print April 2009 (US)/ June 2008 (UK) Paperback: 288 pages I know I am reading a good book when it simultaneously breaks my heart into tiny million pieces and makes me laugh as the pieces are put together – over and over again. The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian is one such book. I heard only good, awesome things about it, about the many awards it won and the Neil Gaiman quote on the cover only helped me picking it up. But I was not prepared for what I found and I don’t think anyone could ever be prepared for it. The book was first published in the US back in 2007 and is a first person, semi-autobiographical account of Arnold Spirit, Jr.’s life as a Spokane Indian living in the Reservation with his family, and his ultimate decision of going to an all-white school just outside the rez in search for a chance to have a future. It is filled with hope to its brim even as hope is something that Indians are not supposed to have. The heartbreaking starts on page 1 as Junior starts telling his story about being born with “water in his brain” and the resulting physical damage: ranging from over-sized head, hands and feet, bad eyesight to seizures, stuttering and lisping. Being a child with all the aforementioned is bad enough but you can just about get away with being “cute” but being a 14 year old teenage boy is unbearable. Especially when you are bullied, constantly beaten up (careful with the head!) and called a “retard”. Junior also has forty-two teeth – ten more than normal, and if I thought my heart was breaking on page 1, it was on page 2 that I truly learnt the meaning of a heart shattered with RAGE: “I went to the Indian Health Service to get some teeth pulled so I could eat normally, not like some slobbering vulture. But the Indian Health Service funded major dental work only once a year, so I had to have all ten extra teeth pulled in one day. And what’s more, our white dentist believed that Indians only felt half as much pain as white people did, so he only gave me half the Novocain.” And it continues. Junior is dirty poor, his father is an alcoholic, as are most Indians in the reservation; no one looks into the future, his sister has been living in their basement for years. He is constantly threatened with physical damage by bullies (some of them, ADULTS). His best friend is his dog Oscar who has to be put down by his father because they can’t afford to take him to the vet when he gets sick. It is not all sadness though; he does have a best non-canine friend in Rowdy, another teen whom he has been friends with since childhood, his grandmother and his drawings. You see, Junior loves to read and draw comics and wants to be a cartoonist one day: “I think the world is a series of broken dams and floods, and my cartoons are tiny little lifeboats.” His cartoons are inserted throughout the narrative and complement it perfectly sometimes being the much needed funny break to what is being described. What is most impressive about the narrative: that all of the horrible, tragic, things that happen to Junior don’t ever come across as being there merely for shock value or drama. The worst (or the best part?) is how it comes across as natural, as normal, as you know, things that happen. Shrug, shrug move on. The style is as though you are deep in conversation with your best friend who might as well be telling you how he went to the grocery store to buy a bottle of milk. That is in itself genius: not only because the reading flows but also because the narrative itself is part of the story. As though Junior, in narrating the story in such an easy way has assimilated the one idea that might bring him down and has brought down his family and ancestors. That Indians are good for nothing and deserve what they have. Over and over again, Junior will say something that will show how ingrained the self-loathing is, only to try and get pass that. This, as much as facing racial problems, poverty is perhaps Junior’s most important challenge. I get a sense of purpose in the storytelling. And how does Junior start breaking the vicious circle though? It starts this one day at school when he is given a new book except the book is not new -it belonged to his own mother. Filled with sense of foreboding, Junior throws the book and it hits his teacher. In the aftermath, the same teacher impresses upon Junior the need for him to GET AWAY. He enrolls at the all-white school and he is the only Indian attending it, if you don’t count their mascot. Surprisingly, he has a harder time with his fellow Indians back at the Rez for making this decision than he has with the white kids. He soon makes friends, joins the basketball team and even gets a white girlfriend. But these things don’t come easy, there is guilt, violence, heartbreak as Rowdy won’t have anything to do with him anymore and a reality that keeps dragging him down but Junior? Junior will not give up. This is a story about identity too: Junior is at once part of his tribe and not a part of his tribe and the way that struggle is handled is superb. I thought that the fact that the ideas are never shorthanded to Indians = Good (the poor Victims) and Whites=Bad (Ultimate Evil). In fact, I think one of my favorite quotes in the book is and the one I shall use to close the review: “I used to think the world was broken down by tribes,” I said. “By black and white. By Indian and white. But I know that isn’t true. The world is only broken into two tribes: The people who are assholes and the people who are not”. Verdict: The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian is unique, raw, funny as hell. A triumph in storytelling, filled with heartbreak but also so much warmth and I can’t recommend it enough. Rating: 9 D*** Near Perfection