The diary “The Absolutely true Diary of a part -time Indian,” written by Sherman Alexie and published 2007, deals with a Indianboy named Arnold and his problems in school, life and with his poor family.
In the following I’m going to analyse Arnold Spirit Jr. and his feelings and his behavior.
Junior is round about 14 years old so he is in the middle of the puberty and is on the way to get an adult like every normal teenager (“I spend hours in the bathroom with a magazine that has one thousand pictures of naked movie stars”, ll.9-10 p.35->puberty). But Arnold isn’t at all just a normal teenager he is something different. All teenagers are bored of school but he is excited in some way (“And I was most especially excited about my first geometry class”, ll. 2-3 p.35 ). Also you can see that Junior loves to masturbate and he tells it to everyone and isn’t ashamed because of this. So you can see that this is brave in a wierd way (“Yep, that’s right ; I admit that I masturbate. I’m proud of it. I’m good at it. I’m ambidextrous”, ll.12-15 p.35). Another thing why Junior is wierd sometimes is that he has some strange habits. When he was eight he slept in his closet and only stopped it because his sister said that this is way to get back in his mother’s womb (ll.10-13 p.36). Maybe because of this Junior thinks that his sister Mary is good at ruining things (“My sister is good at ruining things”, l.19 p.36). In relation to this you could think that Junior doesn’t like his sister very much but not at all. He thinks that she is a very strong, beatiful and funny person(l.22 p.36). Junior says that ” [He is] not like her at all”, l.2 p.38, because he is steady, he is excited about life and he is excited about school (ll. 2-3 p.38). Arnold/Junior is a excited and steady person but he isn’t very self confident person and he doesn’t really believe himself (“[…] the bigger and better kids will crush me”, l.9 p.38). So he thinks that the other kids are better than him and that they give him a crap for being excited but he doesn’t care about that at all so he does his own thing (“And I know that the other kids are going to give me a crap for being so excited about school. But I don’t care”, ll.20-21 p.38). So you can see that Junior is very brave and excited about life and everything but in another way a little bit wierd. Another argument to call him wierd is that he calls himself a “bookkisser” so he loves to kiss, grab and smell them something like a fetish (” I grabbed my book and opened it up. I wanted to smell it. Heck, I wanted to kiss it. Yes, kiss it. That’s right, I am a book kisser”, ll.4-8 p.41).
All in all it can be said that Junior is a very happy and excited teenager who wants to learn something about life but sometimes is very wierd and also different than other kids.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie 