Tuesday, February 1, 2011
My thoughts on a Part time Indian
Alexie, in his book, "A Part time Indian," makes a lot of stark comparisons between life on the rez and life in the "white world." I will agree and acknowledge the fact that Native Americans, especially those who still live on reservations, do not have as many opportunities as people who live in the world outside of the reservations. However, I do not feel as if it was Alexie's purpose to illustrate the differences between the two worlds. I believe it was his intent to show that no matter where you come from and no matter your race that we all have hurdles that we need to clear and we all have to face adversity. No matter our stripes we all share in the struggle that we call life. The book is not about who has it harder but, that all of our struggles are different and that we all struggle none the less; whether it is an eating disorder, parents that do not care, drugs, alcohol or any other consortium of problems that one can have. The point though is to not accept our fate in this life but to overcome these obstacles that are set out in front of us. Personally, in my life, I have had to overcome diabetes. Before I was diagnosed I wanted to be a Marine more than anything in this world. It was my dream and my passion but when I found out I was a diabetic it was gone in the blink of an eye. Ever since then I have been lost in what I want out of this life but, this is one of my struggles in life and something I continue to try to overcome every day. We can never stop pursuing our dreams or trying to realize our dreams because that is what keeps us moving forward. The day we give up is the day we might as well crawl into a ball and shut ourselves off from the world or, crawl into a bottle. The point of the book is to never give up on our dreams and to not let the adversity that we face through-out our lives defeat us.
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I love your post so much! It changes the way I see this novel. "I believe it was his intent to show that no matter where you come from and no matter your race that we all have hurdles that we need to clear and we all have to face adversity. No matter our stripes we all share in the struggle that we call life. The book is not about who has it harder but, that all of our struggles are different and that we all struggle none the less" I love the way you think. You are right about it. The book is delivering the sprit of Junior. To achieve our goals no matter how ridiculous it sounds we have to believe ourself and overcome the adversities.
ReplyDeleteI really like your take from the novel. This is basically the same kind of things that I was thinking as I was reading too. "No matter our stripes we all share in the struggle that we call life." I coulnd't agree with that line more. To add onto that I also believe that we all struggle but it really depends what we want/expect from life too.
ReplyDeleteNow it has been quite a while ago for reading Sherman Alexie’s book, since we have been studying about the Native Americans so this couple of week, we did some research on some local Indian American tribes and presented to the class one time, and our teacher actually invited two Indian speakers to the class to tell us about their personal thoughts of being as a Native American. So now, looking back to your post, I find you certainly pick up something important from Sherman Alexie’s piece. Great effort.
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