Junior's Cartoons In 'The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part-Time Indian'

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Junior’s cartoons are “tiny little lifeboats” that keep him afloat during complicated moments. In the book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, Junior’s cartoons show him hope, and this hope helps him not just float, but soar. One of his cartoons in particular shows this. (Please see appendix a.) In this image the wings represent Junior flying away on the wings of hope. The word white written below represents that hope is always there, Junior just needs go deeper into himself, into the part of himself he thinks of as white, to find it. This connects very closely to the idea of stereotypes. Junior thinks of all the good aspects of a person as white, and the bad aspect as Indian. The smiling clouds are also symbolic. …show more content…

One of his cartoons is of him, with one half of him looking the way he does currently, and the other half looking the way he would look like if he had more money, or as he thinks of it, if he were white. (Please refer to appendix b.) The character traits written around the drawing help Junior realise that he has good character traits within him, he just needs to look into the part of himself he thinks of as white to find them. At one point in the book Junior is called an apple, red on the outside and white on the inside. This is what he needs to learn about himself; he has the characteristics he thinks of as white inside him. The drawing itself shows him that to be what he wants, he may have to be what the title says, a part-time Indian. Finally, the jokes he makes with how he labels this drawing show that he has already started to find hope by using humor. For example, on the side of him he labels as Indian he isn’t wearing a watch, and he wrote “it's skin-thirty!” (Alexi, page 57) Junior finding hope within him by using his cartoons is significant because it drives him to break the family norm of not having a future, and just ending up back on the

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