My Connection to His Diary (S. Dawkins)

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After I finished reading Sherman Alexie’s “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” I was astonished and also amazed of the quality of his work once again. I’ve read some of his other works and also watched his movie “Smoke Signals” and each time I’m always left with the same feeling. He is an amazing author and his work leaves you with no other option than to be engaged and you won’t ever want to put the book down.
The way that Alexie structured the book was amazing. The diary set up was very effective and authentic. You are able to get inside of Arnold’s mind and know exactly what he is feeling throughout the entire text. I enjoy the fact that he uses graphics throughout the text. It gives you a break from the reading and as he said, “When you draw a picture, everybody can understand it.” (5) Through text we can use their description and form a picture in our head, but in the diary the picture is already there for us to match up with his thoughts and feelings. Finding out his different thoughts and feelings provoked some personal connections, feelings and questions to come to my mind throughout the text.
I personally connected with Arnold during his transition to Rearden. He told himself that there was nothing for him on the rez and that he needed to have hope to set forth on his journey to something better. I made that same decision by coming to college. Where I am from not many people get out of there, they are often stuck work low income jobs, abusing alcohol and/or drugs or gets thrown in jail. I knew that none of those options were for me and that I needed to find my own way.
I do have one question that I kept in my mind and was hoping that by the end of the book he would explain it but it never came up. Alexie begins the book with a short autobiography of Arnold’s life and all throughout the book we experience his day by day routine and how other see him and how he sees himself, but we had to wait half way through the book to find out that his name is Arnold Spirit. Was there a reason to withhold this information and if so what was the reason?

To conclude, I feel that Alexie did an amazing job with the portrayal of adolescents. He allows the readers to see and feel what most adolescents go through on a day to day basis and also allows adolescent readers to know that they are not the only ones going through a certain situation and that there are always things they can do to change their current situation to make it more positive. 

Comments

  1. UnknownAugust 30, 2016 at 5:46 PM

    I can totally understand what you're saying about feeling connected to Junior throughout his transition to Reardan. Personally, I've gone to seven different schools. Each time, I was hoping to find myself in a better situation than the last.
    Also about your question concerning his name, I had two ideas for why that could be. On one hand, not knowing his name for a portion of the novel provides more universality in my opinion. It's as if this kid could be anyone, because we don't know exactly who he is yet. I also thought it could have been to reflect his own perceived anonymity up to that point. Junior perhaps didn't feel as though he was worth mentioning, if that makes sense?

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