their best friends” to “the tribe of tortilla chips-and-salsa lovers.” He also realizes how many other tribes he has, from “the tribe of boys who really miss. The reservation’s poverty and desolate alcoholism offer early mortality and broken dreams, but Junior’s knowledge that he must leave is rooted in love and respect for his family and the Spokane tribe. Rowdy rejects him, feeling betrayed, and their competing basketball teams take on mammoth symbolic proportions. Despite his parents’ frequent lack of gas money (they’re a “poor-ass family”), racism at school and many crushing deaths at home, he manages the year. Soon after they start freshman year, Junior boldly transfers from a school on the Spokane reservation to one in a tiny white town 22 miles away. doi: 10.3968/j. nimbly blends sharp wit with unapologetic emotion in his first foray into young-adult literature.įourteen-year-old Junior is a cartoonist and bookworm with a violent but protective best friend Rowdy. Sherman Alexie: Crossing cultures, BookPage interview by Katherine Wyrick. Terminator 2: The writer in search of an identity (R. Suvremena književnost američkih starosjedilaca. The Maynooth Review/Revieú Mhá Nuad, 5(1), 3–9. Carens (Eds.), Critical essays on James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (pp. Josipovici (Ed.), The modern English novel: the reader, the writer and the work (pp. His master’s voice? The questioning of authority in literature.

The absolutely true diary of a part- time Indian. Drawing on the basic features of diary as a form of intensely autobiographical writing, the paper aims at pointing to its multiple therapeutic forces, as well as to the phenomenological importance of self-expression in artistic, political, and existential terms, as the words are, once again, seen as an agent of a world’s transformation.Īlexie, S. The focus of this paper, therefore, is not only the protagonist’s psychological duality, generally inherent to the genre itself, but also the transformative power of the particularly hybrid and culturally pluralistic narrative that, in this case, effectively combines Native American and Anglo-European traditions. Belonging to a broad genre of Bildungsroman and a less broad literary form known as fictional diary, Sherman Alexie’s young-adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part- Time Indian (2007) explores the implications of self-narration in the context of a painful search for a more unified and solid identity within a fragmented and stereotype-troubled social and political framework.