He's the reservation outcast, and he's been beaten to a pulp more times than is probably healthy.Īrnold (like Alexie) makes a choice to leave the reservation and attend the affluent white school twenty-two miles away in Reardan. Arnold is also a hydrocephalic with a stutter and a lisp who is picked on mercilessly.
Arnold is funny, sensitive, and a budding artist (as Ellen Forney's amazing illustrations prove).Īrnold, though, is not only a teenage Indian going through all of the usual coming of age stuff. The hilarious narrator of The Absolutely True Diary is a fourteen-year-old Native kid named Arnold Spirit, Jr., a character based in part on Alexie's experiences growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, WA. The book dropped in 2007 and has been getting heaped with praise from the date of its publication, even winning the ultimate American lit prize: the National Book Award. In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), Alexie switches to the young adult genre in order to offer an autobiographical depiction of reservation life that is both bleak and hopeful, and both heartrending and uplifting.
He's just that much of a Renaissance Man. and we wouldn't be surprised if he announced that he was planning on jump-starting a career in underwater welding, trapeze artistry, or shark whispering. Sherman Alexie is a jack of all trades: he makes films, writes poetry, performs stand-up comedy, and pens novel after novel. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian Introduction
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