Adolescence is, at its essence, a time of change: physical change, emotional change, and the terrifying promise of change that comes with the beginning to question one's identity. Margaret A. Edwards, the guiding spirit of modern teen librarianship, defined the problem of young adulthood in The Fair Garden and the Swarm of Beasts: “[Young adults] are people in their teens who have outgrown the role of children and have become eager, anxious understudies of adults,” she writes. Suspended between the two figurative worlds of childhood and adulthood, these adolescents struggle to define themselves, even as their perception of the world around them changes.
So who could be more appealingly relatable to young adults than a character suspended between two identities and two worlds?
Enter Arnold Spirit, the hero of Sherman Alexie's young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Arnold is literally caught between two worlds, and spends much of this delightfully poignant and funny novel trying to make a place for himself in the in-between. At his brand-new, all-white high school, he is Arnold the Indian; at home on the reservation, he is Junior the white-lover. “I felt like two different people inside of one body,” Arnold narrates, adding, “No, I felt like a magician slicing myself in half” (Diary, 61). In the article "Selecting Literature for a Multicultural Curriculum," Rudine Sims Bishop states that "Literature can contribute to self esteem by holding up to its readers images of themselves" (“Selecting,” 4). Though Sims Bishop is discussing the value of multicultural literature for minority readers, this commentary rings true for the young adult readers of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian from all walks of life. All adolescent readers are, on some level or other, grappling with changing worlds and changing identities, and to see their own problems reflected in fiction can give them the self-esteem that seems so scarce in the turbulent teen years.
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2 comments:
This tale is an enjoyable read by all! It has much humor and the drawings throughout add greatly to the tale.
Arnold is stuck between 2 worlds, he lives on an Indian Reservation, but goes to a local "white" school. Despite the prejudice in the school against Indians, he develops several friendships, friends who stand up for him after many deaths in his family.
A telling part of the story is that before he decides to go to the Reardan, they have beaten the Reservation school in basketball, baseball, and debate. Once he is at Reardan, he makes the basketball team and when he plays his old teammates, he has something to prove. And he does with Reardan winning. Arnold is elated until he looks at his former teammates and realizes his former school has lost ... again!
I fully agree with the idea that everyone can relate, to some extent, to feeling trapped between two places. Not everyone will have such an outward "two worlds" (the struggle might lie within, as with sexual identity or questioning status quo, say, as a woman who wants to be a truck driver) but I feel that reading Arnold's struggle with his two identities might be an outlet. A chance for readers to see the strength with which Arnold addresses the various issues arising from his life in Reardon versus his live on the reservation, and a chance to recognize that though the troubles in Arnold's life are real and genuine, so is his humor, which helps him to see that he can't always take himself too seriously.
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