The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian

Thanks, Charlene for a good example of parallelism.

Alexie, S. (2007). The absolutely true diary of a part-time Indian. New York: Hachette.

            Arnold Spirit, Jr. is a fourteen-year-old boy who lives on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington, where he has experienced poverty and parental alcoholism, and a host of medical problems. During his life, family and friends like have ridiculed him due to his stuttering, a lisp, and for interests that earn him the stigma of an outcast on the reservation. Hoping for a better education and chance to be happy in life, Junior decides to leave the reservation to attend the all-whit Reardan High School, where the only other Indian is the school mascot. Although he experiences some academic and athletic success there, he is unable to escape the ridicule of others. Throughout the novel, Junior endures several significant losses and eventually learns to form an identity independent of the stereotypes of either Indians or whites.

            In the classroom, I would use excerpts from this book to teach rhetorical analysis. Two chapters, “The Black Eye-of-the-Month-Club” (Chapter One) and “How Monsters Fight” (Chapter Eight) are excellent choices to help students understand how the author’s style conveys the theme of the novel. A “big question” I would ask students is “How would you describe your journey to developing your own identity?” I would then use one or both of these short chapters to explore how the author’s style reveals the theme of this journey to identity. Specifically, the first person narration establishes the voice of the adolescent narrator. The first few lines of Chapter One depict this: “I was born with water on the brain. Okay, so that’s not exactly true. I was actually born with too much cerebral spinal fluid inside my skull. But cerebral spinal fluid is just the doctor’s fancy way of saying brain grease.” The narrator continues this straightforward discussion of the congenital condition that serves as a source of his ridicule. The dark humor he uses to describe his condition creates the voice of the adolescent narrator. Further, the simplistic, often choppy syntax reflects the thought patterns of a young person and creates a conversational and matter-of-fact tone as he continues to describe his medical challenges:

First of all, I ended up having forty-two teeth. The typical human has thirty-two, right?  But I had forty-two.

Ten more than usual.

Ten more than normal.

Ten more than human.

The choppy structure is obvious again as he describes life on the reservation:

                        Do you know what happens to retards on the rez?

                        We get beat up.

                        At least once a month.

                        Yep, I belong to the Black-Eye-of-the-Month Club.

Alexie also utilizes parallelism, as in this example when he talks about why he likes to draw:

                        “I draw all the time.

                        I draw cartoons of my mother and father; my sister and my grandmother; my best friend, Rowdy; and everybody else on the rez.

                        I draw because words are too unpredictable.

                        I draw because words are too limited.

Here, (as is the short syntax in the above examples), parallelism is used to emphasize the importance of the subject being discussed. These rhetorical techniques continue throughout the novel and sustain the voice established in this first chapter.

            It would be interesting to have students bring in a map of their personal journeys that would illustrate their origins (family, culture, etc.) what influences they encounter along the way, and the destination they foresee (college, career, family, etc.) It would also be fun to have students illustrate them in the cartoon drawings typical of the kind Junior draws, as depicted by book illustrator Ellen Forney. Alternately, the cartoon art could be used to teach students to analyze visual text.  

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.5 Analyze how an author’s choices concerning how to structure specific parts of a text (e.g., the choice of where to begin or end a story, the choice to provide a comedic or tragic resolution) contribute to its overall structure and meaning as well as its aesthetic impact.