The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part Time Indian Analysis

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Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian Essay
“How does Sherman Alexie develop the theme of identity in his novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian?”

Sherman Alexie, the author of The Absolutely true Diary of a Part-Time Indian, uses many different viewpoints to explain a characters total identity to the reader. These include things like social standing and also just the characteristics of the person that they’ve developed themselves.

Alexie portrays the main character, Junior, as being a Native American Indian that doesn’t quite know where he belongs in society. He was born a Native American but decides to go to an all white school, off the reservation where he lives. This makes all of the reservation Indians consider Junior as a traitor. Although Junior wants everyone to leave him alone and be happy for him, …show more content…
It is said in the book that this is quite common for reservation Indian families. Many times during the book, Junior tries to hide the fact that he is extremely poor from all his rich, white school friends so they wouldn’t think that he’s ‘uncool’ or ‘unworthy’ of their friendship. He would make up excuses such as leaving his wallet at home but in the end, everyone already knew and just accepted him for who he was. Junior just had to accept who he was and work around all of the problems that he had to face. Throughout the book, Alexie used many racial slurs and other hurtful comments to describe Junior’s appearance and background. Some were used by Junior himself and some from people that bullied him at school. Racism has always been a big problem within society within the minority groups such as Black Americans and Native Americans. Junior was never really hurt by all the racial comments as he was used to it from all that he had received throughout his
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