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Part Time Indian

Decent Essays

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian is a novel for young adults by Sherman Alexie, illustrated by Ellen Forney and was published in September 12, 2007. This novel is a first person narrative by a Native American teenager Arnold Spirit Jr, also known as Junior. In this essay I will be emphasising mainly on the root cause of physical and psychological violence in the text and how Arnold represents and comes to terms with violence in his life. Junior is a 14 year old budding Indian cartoonist who lives in the Spokane Indian Reservation and schools at the reservation. He was born with a hydrocephalus and because of that he is very small for his age and suffers seizures, stuttering, lisping and poor eye sight. He is always been picked …show more content…

The poverty of this family is seen in an early stage where Juniors’ dog had to be killed by his father because they couldn’t afford to take him to the veterinarian after he suffered a stroke. ‘’I wanted to hate my mom and dad for our poverty, I wanted to blame them for my sick dog and for all the other sickness in the world’’. Junior was raging with hatred and anger because of the poverty he was born in. Page 11 Junior has only one friend named Rowdy, Rowdy is physically abused at home and as a result he ends up being a bully at school. He stands up for Junior in every situation though he sometimes don’t understand Juniors decisions and thinks he is an idiot. Going to school at Reardan was one of the decisions that Rowdy thought was idiotic and stupid and he felt like strangling Junior instantly. Indians from the Reservation have the notion that Indians should stick together as one no matter what, and they should not leave the Reservation regardless of any situation. This notion again creates violence as Junior decided to go to an all-white school at Reardan Washington and he was encouraged by his high school teacher but he gets hated for his decision. And yet again violence is seen as a communication skill in the reservation as people understand more when violence has influenced some things or

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