And a cartoon inserted after Mr. P tells Junior to leave the reservation shows Junior standing by a road sign, beginning a journey from Home toward Hope and??? What do you do when the world has declared nuclear war on you? Pledging to treat his team with dignity and respect, and treating Junior s tears and yucking (or pregame vomiting) with compassion and understanding, Coach becomes an important father figure for Junior. It sucks to be poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be poor. Mala Himatul Aulia, NIM: 1111026000040, Representation of Native American in the Novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. PLOT SUMMARY Fourteen-year-old Junior, a Spokane Indian boy, was born with water on the brain or hydrocephalus.
Junior hopes and prays that someday Rowdy and the rest of his tribe will forgive him for leaving and that he will someday be able to forgive himself. Dodge ignores Junior s contribution because he s Indian, the basketball court is a place where Junior s commitment and shooting talent make him one of the most valuable players on the team, even though he is shorter and skinnier than all the other boys. Rowdy is introduced as a kind of character foil to Junior he s the strongest kid on the reservation while Junior is the weakest, and he has trouble expressing any feelings other than anger, while Junior cries frequently and expresses himself easily in cartoons. RELATED LITERARY WORKS Get hundreds more LitCharts at The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian s coming-of-age themes and gritty realism, as well as its diary conceit and autobiographical qualities, make it similar to Jim Carroll s 1978 memoir The Basketball Diaries, which Alexie lists among his most important influences. My parents came from poor people who came from poor people who came from poor people, all the way back to the very first poor people.
If a family has been stuck in poverty for that many generations, then there is both very little opportunity to escape and, therefore, very little reason for anyone to hope for a better life. After that happens, Junior asks Eugene to stitch up his cut on his head before going back onto court because they had just started playing again after halftime. Rowdy and Junior go to a powwow in Spokane, Washington. Chapter 23 – Wake... feeling guilty for years about keeping it. Here, Junior is explaining that it's not his parents' fault that their family is poor; they didn't make stupid decisions about money, they just never had any to begin with. ArtGlobal Language Review. In turn, Junior supports Rowdy as he deals with his abusive, alcoholic father. And I want the world to pay attention to me. Junior illustrates this by walking readers through the thoughts he has when he is feeling bad about himself. Though a gradual change in his own identity seems impossible to Junior now, by 2017 LitCharts LLC v. 006 Page 7. the end of the novel he will understand that his Reardan and reservation identities can coexist. He has published 25 books including his first picture book, Thunder Boy Jr, and young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, both from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers; What I've Stolen, What I've Earned, a book of poetry, from Hanging Loose Press; and Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories, from Grove Press. Realizing that it s possible to be more than one thing part of many different tribes is what enables him to unify his split identity and, as someone destined to travel beyond the reservation, navigate the world both literally and figuratively. At the beginning of the novel, Junior sees his cartoons, and his skill as an artist, as his one chance of leaving the reservation: tiny little lifeboats in a world of broken dams and floods. Most of the adults in Junior s life, including his father and his father s friend Eugene, turn to alcohol as a way of dealing with the sense of despair and defeat brought on by poverty and a racist system that doesn t pay attention to their dreams and become even further embedded in that system as a result.
Described as an eighty-year-old literature professor trapped in the body of a fifteen-year-old white farm boy from Reardan, Gordy teaches Junior how to take books seriously and also draw joy from them. Penelope finds out and donates money in both her and Junior's names. To Junior, the loss of hope is part of what it means to live on the rez and be Indian. As a modern coming-of-age novel with a distinctive first-person narrative voice, Absolutely True Diary can also be compared to The Catcher in the Rye, although Holden Caulfield s privileged background provides a stark contrast to Junior s impoverished one. Rowdy fouls Junior so badly that it gives him a concussion during this game too (Rowdy was an opposing player). He might have thought before that he could turn into a new version of himself, but is now discovering that can t happen without some kind of loss. MINOR CHARACTERS The Andruss Brothers Thirty-year-old triplets who beat Junior up when he and Rowdy go to the powwow. Book Description Audio Book (CD). Smoke Signals, the movie he wrote and co-produced, won the Audience Award and Filmmakers Trophy at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. Want to learn the ideas in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian better than ever? A few days later, Roger insults Junior with a racist joke but then Roger respects him when he punches him in the face as a response. Reservation and hope as two opposing forces in Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part- Time Indian.
He wants the advantages and opportunities that the white students seem to have by birthright, but (at the beginning of the novel) doubts his ability to achieve or deserve them. And often lack role models and mentors who themselves got out of poverty. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor. The novel ends as Junior and Rowdy play a oneon-one game of basketball into the night, without keeping score. This self-deprecation feeds into his despair about the cycle of poverty his family is caught in, because, just as he doesn't have an image of Indian beauty, he doesn't have many role models of Indians who aren't poor.
In the aftermath of Grandmother s death, she suffers from depression and anxiety and sometimes needs Junior to stay home because she is scared for him to leave. When she suddenly gets married, moves to Montana, and begins writing a memoir, her life seems to be unfolding like something out of one of her stories until she dies in a tragic, senseless accident, suggesting that the possibility of a better life might sometimes be just a fantasy and that the connection between books and life cannot be so straightforward. As a result, Junior has spent a lot of his time alone, reading or drawing cartoons. Beginning his story I was born with water on the brain (a reference to his own disability of hydrocephalus) and identifying his tough, hot-tempered best friend Rowdy as being born mad, Junior puts an emphasis on how people s traits at birth define their characters, suggesting the he initially holds a slightly reductive vision of identity that doesn t change much over time. Rowdy Junior s best friend from the reservation. Related Characters: Junior (Arnold Spirit, Jr. ) (speaker) Related Themes: Page Number: 31 Explanation and Analysis This is a pivotal moment in the book because finding the geometry book that once belonged to his mother is a concrete example for Junior of the ways in which he, as a poor Indian, is being denied opportunities that he would 2017 LitCharts LLC v. 006 Page 10.
Mary breaks out of her frozen state by moving to Montana to live in a mobile home. And there s the fricking booze: the reason, according to Junior, that all Indian families are unhappy, with too many people dying young. Before even touching on race and poverty, he lets us know that he has a birth defect that affected his brain. Rowdy gets into an accident and embarrasses himself. Gordy uses the language of travel to talk about life, saying books and comics can help to navigate the river of the world. Penelope s idea of adulthood and freedom involves a plan to swim in every ocean to climb Mount Everest to go on an African safari to ride a dogsled in Antarctica. The export option will allow you to export the current search results of the entered query to a file. Assimilation Through Eduation. Even so, when Junior lists the people he will always love and miss, he includes Rowdy, his reservation, and his tribe as well as his loved ones who have died a telling indication that in some ways, following his hopes and dreams ultimately means the loss of his friends, his family, and his home. Junior is close to his grandmother, and turns to her for advice when he believes Roger is going to attack him. Penelope Junior s translucent semi-girlfriend, a beautiful and popular freshman at Reardan High School.
So you might as well gut it out. Earl Penelope s father, a racist who warns Junior that he will disown Penelope if Junior gets her pregnant. Junior sees Oscar as the only living thing that I could depend on and a better person than any human I had ever known. He also feels guilty for having that desire, since it seems to require him to betray his tribe and falsely act as something he is not. Brand New, This is an audio book. We see that he conflates poverty with being Indian and being stupid and ugly. Upload your study docs or become a. Thus, when Rowdy wishes Junior happiness in his nomadic travels, he means it literally, but also symbolically; Junior has passed out of the childhood they shared, and into a life of his own.
As a result, Junior is suspended from school. Junior is remembering when his beloved dog died and his grief led him to want to go away from everyone. After trying out pre-med and pre-law studies at Gonzaga University, Alexie transferred in 1987 to Washington State University, where he began to write and study literature. Since he can't chalk this "failure" up to Mary's personal failings, Junior finds it emblematic of a social reality in which Indians don't have the kinds of opportunities that white kids take for granted. Grandmother Spirit Junior s grandmother. Even for Penelope, who is white and thus, from Junior s point of view, has hope as part of her birthright, having dreams means wanting to leave the place she came from. James Luna's multimedia performances are largely rooted in his culture and daily experience as a Pooyukitchchum (Luiseño) Indian living on La Jolla reservation north of San Diego, in Southern….