Sherman Alexie's Superman And Me

There are some children, like the Indian boy in the short story that will simply not be given a chance to learn how to read and must adapt quickly to survive. Alexie took his fate into his own hands at an early age. Although the author never states the age of the boy, we are to imagine he is grade school age. Alexie states that the boy’s father had an extensive book collection from which he had taught himself how to read, but never mentions if the father had helped his son to learn to read. I imagine the father was too busy trying to support his family by working minimum wage jobs and finding work where he could find it. Needless to say, Alexie adapted well given his situation. These experiences give him accreditation with the reader,

Sherman Alexie the author of the essay "The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me" was born and raised on a Spokane Indian Reservation. Growing up, his family did not have a lot of money, yet today Alexie is known as one of the most prominent Native American writers. Alexie reminisces on his childhood when he first taught himself how to read. In the essay "The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me" Sherman Alexie suggests, that for Native Americans reading is the key to education and education is the key to prosperity in life.

I am lucky.” He is also very repetitive with this quote throughout the text, almost as if he is reminding himself as to why he is trying to learn to read and write, and working harder to defeat the stereotype. But when he states this in the text, he is trying to teach Indians to learn just like he did. In the passage, it states, “Then there are the sullen and already defeated Indian kids who sit in the back rows and ignore me with theatrical precision. The pages of their notebooks are empty.

(EXAMPLE,COMMENTARY,COMMENTARY) Another example(Beginning should mention middle) of repetition is when Mr. P says “All your friends. All the bullies. And their mothers and fathers have given up. And their grandparents gave up and their grandparents before them. And me and every other teacher here.We’re all defeated” (42). Alexie uses the word “and” repeatedly, which adds more emphasis and creates an environment in his book that, to the reader, is easier to understand through his perspective. This quote is important because it shows Mr. P. is trying to tell Junior that everyone has given up and he doesn't want Junior to, because he believes in him and has hope for his future. Repetition and punctuation usage is shown again on page 52, when Junior says “Bang! Rowdy punched me. Bang! I hit the ground. Bang! My nose bled like a firework” (52). This shows that after going to a white school, outside the reservation, many other indians despised and felt betrayed by Junior. By using punctuation and a simile, Alexie shows that the hatred even turned to violence from Juniors bestfriend, Rowdy. Another example of violence, from the end section of the book, is when Rowdy hits Junior during a basketball game, causing Junior to have to go to the hospital. (“They stared at me, the Indian boy with the black eye and swollen nose, my going-away gifts from Rowdy. Those white kids couldn't

Alexie goes on to demonstrate how his passion for reading influenced his childhood. He describes that, before he could even read, he would recognize what a paragraph was. Alexie explains, “I realized that a paragraph was a fence that held words” (Alexie 279). Then, Alexie further explains how he correlated other things in his life as paragraphs, such as the reservation in respect to the United States or the individual members of his family. He goes on to clarify how he found the Superman comic and viewed each panel, with text and illustrations, separately as its own paragraph. Alexie states that while reading the comic he says, “Aloud, I pretend to read the words” (Alexie 280). He knew these paragraphs together told a story and even though he could not read, he used the pictures to assume what the narrative was saying. With these details of his early beginnings of learning to read, the reader can further establish that his family’s economic status had no

“Superman and Me” by Sherman Alexie is a brief passage describing a personal experience of the author’s childhood – specifically, how he learned to read and the impact it has had on his life. He discloses that he is of Indian descent from his father. Sherman speaks of his father in admiring tones, of how he devoured books and was an educated Indian, of how his house was always full of literature and how he chose himself to attend catholic schools (he was one of the very few Indians who purposely did). According to Sherman, he learned to read through the use of a Superman graphic novel by imagining his own meaning to the different panels and deducing what the words meant by doing this throughout the story. Eventually, he ends up reading more and more, and he is signaled out in his

Sherman Alexie recalls his childhood memory of learning to read, and his teaching experience in “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me”. He devotes his interest to reading. By this way, he breaks the stereotype that Indian boys are expected to be stupid and dumb, and later on he becomes a successful writer because of his endeavor to read. Alexie vividly narrates his younger life by using metaphor and repetition with a confident tone, in order to strengthen his description of his reading talent, his influence to the other Indian boys and how he struggles in poverty to change his life.

Superman and Sherman Alexie both have unique qualities about them. The passage states that Sherman Alexie could read complicated books at a young age while other kids had a hard time. Superman

Growing up as a Native American boy on a reservation, Sherman Alexie was not expected to succeed outside of his reservation home. The expectations for Native American children were not very high, but Alexie burst out of the stereotype and expectations put by white men. Young Native Americans were not expected to overcome their stereotypes and were forced to succumb to low levels of reading and writing “he was expected to fail in a non-Indian world” (Alexie 3), but Alexie was born with a passion for reading and writing, so much so that he taught himself to read at age three by simply looking at images in Marvel comics and piecing the words and pictures together. No young Native American had made it out of his reservation to become a successful writer like he did. This fabricates a clear ethos for Alexie, he is a perfect underdog in an imperfect world.

“Superman and Me” involves the author, Sherman Alexie as an adolescent boy. Alexie lived in Washington on a Spokane Indian Reservation where he grew up with parents who were poor most of the time. Although, his parents “usually managed to find some minimum-wage job or another” (Alexie). The father of Alexie went to a Catholic school where he read whatever he came into sight with. Alexie looked up to his father; therefore, he wanted to be an avid reader just like his dad. Before he could even read, Alexie picked up many books. Although words look foreign to Alexie, he understood the purpose of a paragraph, and “realized that a paragraph was a fence that held words” (Alexie). Everything he looked at, he referred to it as a paragraph. Living a life inside of a paragraph, Alexie one day picked up a Superman comic book. This day became the day he learned how to read American literature. Looking at pictures in the comic book, Alexie assumes what he sees. This method eventually taught him the way of reading English. In the essay, Alexie states, “I was smart. I was arrogant. I was lucky. I read books late into the night, until I could barely keep my eyes open…” Not the typical student, Alexie would be told to be quiet in the classroom. Never did he expect being smarter would come with consequences. Is this the kind of American Dream Alexie wanted? Despite all the learning and being an outcast, the author became a writer, as well as

As he grew up to become a writer, we see pain in the story he tells. “I loved those books, but I also knew that love had only one purpose. I was trying to save my life” (pg.18). Alexie wanted to be someone greater than what others expected him to be. People would put him down constantly, but he fought back just as much. He tried to save himself from the stereotypes of being just another dumb Indian. He had more determination to prove others wrong when it came too exceeding in reading to further excel in his daily life.

Sherman Alexie the author of the essay "The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me" was born and raised on a Spokane Indian Reservation. Growing up his family did not have a lot of money, yet today Alexie is known as one of the most prominent Native American writers. Alexie reminisces on his childhood when he first taught himself how to read. In the essay "The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me" Sherman Alexie suggests, that for Native Americans reading is the key to education and education is the key to prosperity in life.

Alexie wants to show how he is affected by racism in his time and how even though there have been laws passed not to discriminate against people. Whenever police brutality is a main issue in today's era, then that means that racism has not been resolved. Alexie is proving the issue and proving that it has permanently scarred people to where they can’t fall asleep knowing they will be okay in the morning. Whereas the people that are causing this to people of colored decent, sleep as if nothing had happened to them and they are not even realizing how much hurt they are causing other people.

In his article, Alexie faced continuous struggles as a child, being a Spokane Indian boy. He ends up following his father's footsteps in developing a love for books. When he becomes older, he begins to read almost anything and everything that has words drawn or printed on it. For example, he read things such as junk mail, cereal boxes, manuals, magazines, and just anything that had words he could get his hands on. This also included all of the new books his father would bring home with him and the ones that his father already owned. Alexie read out of desperation to save his life from the unknowing and the reality that he lives in, he also read out of joy. He gives a well developed argument which was him explaining how he had to teach himself

Alexie compartmentalized his life in paragraphs which shows how important reading was even as a young child.. In the beginning of the essay Alexie writes that he grew up poor with “a combination of irregular paychecks, hope, fear and government surplus food”(324). His parents hopped from one minimum wage job to another so his life lacked stability. Once alexie realized the purpose of a paragraph he “began to think of everything in terms of paragraphs”(325). Alexie then goes into specifics on how catagorized every part of his life. He organized his life into paragraphs to bring a sense of stability. Making that connection shows that literature was essential in his development since before he could