Relevance as a YA Novel

Summary

The main character and narrator is fourteen year old Arnold Spirit, known as Junior. Arnold is an American Indian, a member of the Spokane Indian tribe where he and his family live on the Spokane Indian reservation.  Junior is born with multiple medical illnesses such as unexpected seizures as well as physical shortcomings like stuttering and lisping.  In addition to his health issues Arnold is taunted daily by members of the reservation as well as beat up, with the exception of his best friend Rowdy.  Upon finding his mother’s maiden name in the same text book, Junior becomes fed up with the injustices of poverty, and reacts with disgust by throwing the book at his white teacher Mr. P.  This action gets him suspended but also sets Junior up for a new direction.  Mr. P visits Junior and encourages him not to give up, pointing to Junior’s strengths—his intelligence and book smarts—and suggests that Junior attend Reardon if he ever wants to overcome the poverty which he so despises.  Junior makes the decision to attend Reardon, the predominantly white school, which happens to be on the opposite side of town.  Junior faces many obstacles with his decision to attend school outside the reservation.  Arnold’s best friend Rowdy despises him for leaving him alone on the reservation and punches him in the face upon hearing the news.  Further Arnold encounters racism from the students and teachers at Reardon as well as endures the death of family and friends who are closest to him.  Junior not only endures tragedy and hardship but he triumphs in Sherman Alexie’s coming of age story.  Alexie touches on central topics that all high school students can relate with.  Important topics such as eating disorders, bullying, racism, alcoholic parents, and the difficulty that changing schools presents—being the new kid, making friends, and trying to fit in—are all present in Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.  By the end of the Story Arnold Spirit emerges triumphant, a little wiser and gazes towards what he recognizes as a bright future. 

Relevance to the YA Genre

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian is firmly placed in the YA genre for several reasons. It deals with many of the themes present in most YA books, using humor as a tool throughout. Humor is a very useful technique for drawing teens into the more serious or difficult topics.  The humor which Alexie uses makes the tough/taboo topics such as racism, alcoholism, poverty, sexuality, and the like more easily engaging for audiences.

First, Junior finds his agency within ATDPI through control of his own education. By deciding to leave the Reservation, he seeks to increase his knowledge, something he knows he can’t do with the limited resources available on the reservation. 

By doing this, Junior faces his own identity crisis; he is called an “apple”, white on the inside, and red on the outside. He faces negative challenges from both sides, in Reardon and in Wellpinit.

Initially in Reardon, his fellow classmates would call him “Chief”, or Tonto. He is an outsider; someone to ignore, or in the case of a few individuals, bully. Finally Rodger, the biggest instigator of the bullying, went too far with his racial slurs, prompting Junior to punch him. On the reservation he is considered a traitor, and the harassment he received by the reservation population increased.  Junior’s struggles with these problems are helped little by his parents. Though they are good parents in their own way, his father is an alcoholic, who disappears for days on end, and his mother has given up. Neither can shelter him from the problems he faces on a day to day basis. While they try to help him as much as possible, it is up to Junior to make his own way to Reardon High School, located twenty miles from the reservation, and to make his own decisions on what he plans to do with his own life. These are all issues that are prevalent within the YA genre, and Alexie handles these issues with a delicacy and brutal honesty that makes the adolescent reader question presumptions that they have towards reservation life.

For all of Alexies books, however, ATDPI was the first to be marketed towards young adults. So why is this book different? Alexie isn’t completely sure. “I’ve always written about young men,” he says, “and a lot of books about teenagers. So YA is not a big subject matter leap for me. But what sets this book apart as YA is the fact that the protagonist is not looking back. It’s not told in the past tense, but rather in the now.” (Johnston).

Alexie also mentions different stylistic strategies he uses.

“There was a slightly different vocabulary,” he says, “a slightly different sentence structure. And I think in general, YA is more driven by the narrative than the lyrical. But my writing style has always been narrative driven. So YA just meant fewer semicolons.” (Johnston)

Relevance to Other Books

Sherman Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary falls into the genre of YA for the controversial themes Alexie addresses, Junior’s resistance to the racial and economical expectations of the established societies, and his personal conflict with his identity and his resolution with it.

Outsiders: Ponyboy and Junior are both stuck in the class of poverty but find ways to identify with or understand the higher class by bridging the gap between them. Junior immerses himself with the high white class by entering Reardon where he discovers that the white students have family problems such as alcoholism, abuse, and eating disorders. This showed him that the white class had problems of their own, allowing him to sympathize and identify with them, because it voided his pedestal image of them, and brought his Reardan classmates on the same level. Ponyboy realizes by talking with Cherry that while the higher class has all the material possessions they want, they are not happy and thus lead a lower quality of life than was thought by the Greasers. Junior and Ponyboy are able to see past the labels that they have been given and find the commonality that exist in both societies. 

The Catcher in the Rye: Holden and Junior resist the expectations of their social classes by defying the educational systems. Holden failed his classes and Junior left the reservation to receive a better education. Both resisted conformity within the educational systems by doing the opposite of what was expected of them with their resources.

The Chocolate War: Jerry refuses to abide by the expectations of selling the school’s chocolate even when both the Vigils and the Brothers begin resenting and punishing him. Jerry failed to escape the cycle of the authority enforced in Trinity whereas Junior was able to escape the cycle of poor education on the reservation, giving him the chance to escape the cycle of poverty as well.

Feed: When Violet resists the feed, she is turned into an outcast, someone who is not understood by the majority of people. When Junior begins resisting the norms of his society, he is labeled as a traitor by his best friend Rowdy and by the people of his established society and the people of Reardon. However, both of them persevere in their efforts despite the scorn they receive.