How is junior shown as an outsider? (This Essay is about The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian) (by Sherman Alexie art by Ellen Forney)
Essay Introduction:
Junior is displayed as an outsider because he is the only true Indian at Reardan. Also he feels as if he has left his culture behind at the rez because he got a better chance then every other person in the reservation . In this essay i am going to show all the different ways the author shows junior as a reject.
Junior is a Indian who has a brain disability and has two names and personalities; junior also wears glasses. He only has one friend that he loses and gains back
junior has two personalities because he ends up moving to this all white school in wellpinit. in that school they call him Arnold and where he lives is at the rez where he used to go reservation camp school . (most of the time junior is too poor to get driven or take the bus to school in wellpinit so he has to hitchhike from the rez to wellpinit. Junior/Arnold has to make it seem like he is not poor at wellpinit. he aslo likes this girl called Penelope. He asks Penelope to prom and has to wear his dads 70s suit and it ironically makes him seem cool but he finds it embarrassing. Poverty makes him an outsider it also makes his family depressed which causes death and that is how his sister died (every Indian got drunk even rowdy everybody except junior/Arnold and his grandmother because most Indians had no hopes and dreams in the rez (controlled by the government)
“I am a zero on the rez. And if you subtract zero from zero, you still have zero. So what’s the point of subtracting when the answer is always the same?”
This quote show that junior feels like he is an outsider because he sees himself as nothing because he has always be rejected and he was born into being poor.
“Rowdy fought everybody. He fought boys and girls. Men and women. He fought stray dogs. Hell, he fought the weather. He’d throw wild punches at rain.”
This quote shows the reader that all the native Americans are so emotional towards depression that he even tried to fight an element rowdy was going to get more and more angry because he would not win.
“It sucks to be poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be poor.”
Both of these quotes show that its not only junior that is an outsider but its all the native Americans. It shows this because government has traped them in a square like section where they are not allowed to be with other people(they are separated from everyone else). They feel traped because they cant get any high pay jobs because the system is racist (Skin Color)(Native American)
Junior was getting more and more depressed since he dads best friend/uncle got shot in his face through drunk games his sister died his dog died and his grandmother died.
He had to face all those drunken deaths depression on top of on depression which makes him feel even more rejected.
He goes to two different schools. He is an Outsider in Both schools.
Junior faces bullying and really bad name calling (because of his water on the brain) both on the rez and at Reardan, he always has the choice of letting his misery defeat him or trying to overcome it.
Examples:
Feels like he is some sort of unknown species because of the name calling also the rejections he gets some times. He also feels like an outsider because if the community and the extremely racist Caucasian people (Who treat Indians like the are non existent) Here is a example quote
“And what’s more, our white dentist believed that Indians only felt half as much pain as white people did, so he only gave us half the Novocain.”
He Feels even more depressed and upset because he found out that his culture was killed by the Caucasian men. Here is an example quote.
When I first started teaching here, that’s what we did to the rowdy ones, you know? We beat them. That’s how we were taught to teach you. We were supposed to kill the Indian to save the child.’
‘You killed Indians?’
‘No, no, it’s just a saying. I didn’t literally kill Indians. We were supposed to make you give up being Indian. Your songs and stories and language and dancing. Everything. We weren’t trying to kill Indian people. We were trying to kill Indian culture.'”
Conclusion:
The author shows the reader how it is to be in those kind of situations.
The author shows the reader juniors feelings.
The author makes us familiar with junior by anotations and pictures and humor.
This Essay was to show how junior is displayed as an outsider.
To show how it feels to have two lives , two personalites.
So Much death so much depression and how you can still survive.
And also about how you can overcome your shyness.
and how you can still be happy with financial issues and problems.
How to be a survivor.
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