Considered a traitor, Arnold is caught between two worlds: his home on the reservation and the white high school he attends. At times, poverty is just terrible and thus Arnold sometimes wishes that he could draw 'a fist full of twenty dollar bills, and perform some magic trick and make them real'.Īrnold, like Sherman Alexie, makes a choice to leave the reservation and attend the white school 22 miles away in Reardan. She pulls Junior to her and tells him that he. The day of Mary’s death, Junior’s mother is curled up on the couch, and Junior knows that she’s now broken and that she’ll always be broken.

His parents are alcoholics and the family poor. In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, alcoholism is a part of Junior’s life, and is also a cause for a lot of his tragedies. The conflict of the story was not the fact that he got bullied by others for looking weird or that he lived in poverty along with the rest of the reservation.

He is the reservation outcast – an outsider – and he is routinely bullied and beaten up. The novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie describes the story of an Indian growing up on a Spokan Indian Reservation. The following is an excerpt from the winner of the 2007 National Book Award for young. Arnold or Junior, as he is often called, is partly based on Alexie’s own experiences. Excerpt: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. The deep seeded resentment between Indians and white people is alive and modernized in this book, and it is yet another difficult reality to hear from the mind and mouth of a young kid. In this novel we meet Arnold Spirit Jr., a fourteen-year-old Native American. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie 258,641 ratings, 4. In his work he draws upon his own experiences.

Alexie is well known for writing about life on the reservation and the challenges that the USA's native population face today. Sherman Alexie grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, in the state of Washington. The book is in first-person diary format, narrated by Arnold Junior Spirit Jr.

The absolutely true diary of an indian