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The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part Time Indian By Sherman Alexie

Decent Essays

A World of Beliefs

In the world many people have, don’t have, or think they have hope. Hope is many different things. In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, many people have hope and many people think they don’t have hope. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is about a boy named Junior and how he finds his way in the world and how he builds his own path to find hope. He ends up going to a school outside the Reservation where he tries to find a balance between his two identities. Many people in this book, like Junior, Mary and Grandma have many different beliefs about hope and they are all very interesting when you look at them below the surface. The different perceptions people have of …show more content…

a white person. One thing that he said was that whites have “hope” and a “bright future” while Indians only have a “vanishing past” and a “bone-crushing reality.” Junior has these thoughts because everyone on the rez is always drunk and people die all the time like how Junior has been to 42 funerals and 90% of them are from alcohol (pages 199 and 200.) Junior ends up finding some hope at Reardon like when everyone was cheering on Junior in the basketball game and he loved the school. Even though Junior had a stereotype in his head that whites were the only ones with hope he was able to defy his own” laws.”

Mary believes that you need a little push from someone close to follow your dream then hope will come. Mary is the sister of Junior. When Junior left to go to Reardon outside the rez, Mary felt a calling to follow her dream. Mary lived in her basement for years until Junior “moved.” Then she made the crazy decision to marry and move to Montana (page 89.) Mary followed that calling and found hope in living out her dream of living a romance novel. Junior figures this out on page 90 when he said,

How weird is that? It’s almost romantic.
And then I realized that my sister was trying to LIVE a ro- mance novel.

Mary had always wanted to write romance novels and she wanted to live on too. Mary kept in touch with her family, but died on page 201. Mary found hope when her brother left that she could still live out her dream

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