Sherman Alexie's Subtle Sarcasm Essay

Though difficult to pick up David Sedaris employs the rhetoric strategies of Sarcasm, Irony and Understatement.

“The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive,” written by Robert Heinlein an American novelist and science fiction writer. Life isn’t as easy as singing the the alphabet; people will have many struggles and unplanned messes. To demonstrate the impression of irony there are three short stories: Sherman Alexie’s “Because My Father Always Said He Was The Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ At Woodstock,” Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings: A Tale for Children,” and Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard To Find.” While all three short stories are coming from different perspectives, and are written by different people, they all show a significant amount of irony that leads to a twist in the story. There is an abundant amount of irony in all three short

On his seventh day he got into what is referenced to as " the weirdest fist fight " of his life. At this point Alexie composes a list called " The Unofficial and Unwritten (but you better follow them or you 're going to get beaten twice as hard) Spokane Indian Rules of Fisticuffs. Basically, this list says: you have to fight even if you only think you 're being insulted. By putting this list in his story Alexie is creating a portal into society 's expectations of the Spokane Indian reservation to give the reader a better understanding of the Native American culture.

In the article there were many rhetorical strategies. The ones that I feel stood out the most are atmosphere, imagery, and exemplification.

Alexie wants to show how he is affected by racism in his time and how even though there have been laws passed not to discriminate against people. Whenever police brutality is a main issue in today's era, then that means that racism has not been resolved. Alexie is proving the issue and proving that it has permanently scarred people to where they can’t fall asleep knowing they will be okay in the morning. Whereas the people that are causing this to people of colored decent, sleep as if nothing had happened to them and they are not even realizing how much hurt they are causing other people.

As he grew up to become a writer, we see pain in the story he tells. “I loved those books, but I also knew that love had only one purpose. I was trying to save my life” (pg.18). Alexie wanted to be someone greater than what others expected him to be. People would put him down constantly, but he fought back just as much. He tried to save himself from the stereotypes of being just another dumb Indian. He had more determination to prove others wrong when it came too exceeding in reading to further excel in his daily life.

Living Outside the Normal Expectations: How a Single Book Can Chang Your Life. It is funny how something as simple as a heroic picture book can alter someones life. Such as what Sherman Alexie a Author and spokesman who has wrote about his experience in the essay of " The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me". with in this article Alexie explains his life as an impoverished native american boy teaching himself to read.

The bank represents the white stereotype of a good slave, a slave who treasures every little coin. This racial stereotype even follows the narrator around even when he tries to throw away the bank; a person returns it to him. It is difficult for the narrator to overcome this degrading stereotype when he can’t even get rid of the bank. Because of these degrading symbols, the narrator feels invisible. These racial stereotypes depict how the white people believe African-Americans (including himself) should behave. He tries to fight the racial stereotypes created, but it just forces him to act counterfeit. Both of these symbolize show racial stereotypes that follow the narrator throughout the book.

 Joseph Heller's narration, dialogue, and characterization in Catch-22 all create a unique perspective of war and our society's bureaucracy. The satire, sarcasm, irony, and general absurdity of the novel provide a view of the irrationality of man's behavior. The horror that is portrayed in Catch-22 is intensified by the humorous way in which it is portrayed. Distortion and exaggeration highlight the characters and scenario while magnifying the confusion. Parallel structure and repetition serve to reinforce the novel's themes.

As a Native American himself, Alexie can prove and show people some stereotypes about Natives that are true. Some people however, would say that stereotype are just a way for people to judge others. By thinking this, people don't see that even with the name stereotype they are in fact true. In the story “What you pawn I will redeem”, there are stereotypes that people see and would automatically associate with Indians like, be are very bad at spending the money wisely. Alexie showed people this stereotype when he said, “I sold five in one hour, dumped the other forty-five in a garbage can, and walked into McDonald’s, ordered four cheeseburgers for a dollar each”. In this situation, Jackson Jackson had just made money by selling news papers,

I was defending Indians, black people, and buffalo. So I punched Roger in the face.” (Alexie 24). This demonstrates that Junior is willing to stand up for his culture and against racism. However, it also shows that cultural conflict is a real problem within the United States today, which Alexie aims to demonstrate through his fictional memoir How to Fight Monsters.

They carry neither pencil nor pen. They stare out the window. They refuse and resist.” When Alexie was their age, nobody bothered to teach him because he is also Indian. He is trying to tell them that being Indian does not affect intelligence, and Alexie is proof

While Alexie states his voice by using metaphor, he emphasizes the meaning of reading repeatedly in his essay. He stresses how he strives to read variety of books, and he records that,” I read the books my father brought home from the pawnshops and secondhand. I read the books I borrowed from the library. I read the backs of cereal boxes… I read magazines. I read anything that had words and paragraphs” (18). Alexie lists out all the material he has read with the same sentence structure, yet he does not conclude all these things in one sentence. He exemplifies his passion to reading, for he tries to save his life. Due to his parallel repetition, Alexie impresses the audience by these

At a young age Alexie came across to comic books, and at three he started to read them. Although, Alexie came from a poor indian family, he was always surrounded by his father’s books. In which as a result, he started to learn a lot about reading and writing. Personally, I think it’s amazing that his background, economic status and age didn’t push him back from doing what he enjoyed. The importance that Alexie had in paragraphs is wonderful, the way how he connected them to fences, and that everyone and everywhere has their own paragraph. Over all, I think Alexie is an individual that doesn’t hold back from showing who he really is, for example when he was the only one in his classroom who didn’t hide his knowledge. Because all of his indian

Growing up as a Native American boy on a reservation, Sherman Alexie was not expected to succeed outside of his reservation home. The expectations for Native American children were not very high, but Alexie burst out of the stereotype and expectations put by white men. Young Native Americans were not expected to overcome their stereotypes and were forced to succumb to low levels of reading and writing “he was expected to fail in a non-Indian world” (Alexie 3), but Alexie was born with a passion for reading and writing, so much so that he taught himself to read at age three by simply looking at images in Marvel comics and piecing the words and pictures together. No young Native American had made it out of his reservation to become a successful writer like he did. This fabricates a clear ethos for Alexie, he is a perfect underdog in an imperfect world.