Poverty is everywhere; it’s in your backyard, at the front of your door, it can even be in your very own home. In Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, poverty is the most important theme in the book because it negatively influenced Junior’s life. Poverty is the main theme because it affected Junior’s decisions, his family, and the whole Indian community. First of all, poverty was already in Junior’s family.
Being poor can affect you in many ways, but poverty affected Junior’s family because they couldn’t afford anything. They didn’t have enough money since his dad usually gambles most of their money away. They couldn’t afford to buy food because they lived in a Spokane Indian Reservation. They couldn’t take Junior’s best friend Oscar, his dog, to the hospital. They could barely afford to buy Junior new clothes. “I wish I were magical, but I am really just a poor-ass reservation kid living with his poor-ass Spokane Indian Reservation” (7). Poverty means that you’re poor and when you’re poor you have to starve. Poverty made Junior lose his best friend. Poverty made his family and him suffer for not having enough money. Junior wished he was magical because his family and him barely had enough food to eat. What Junior meant by magical is he wished he could just change things with a snap of a finger. After Oscar died Junior wanted to blame his parents for Oscar’s death but he couldn’t. Junior couldn’t because him and his family have a history of being poor, and they can’t help it. They can’t change the past but they didn’t know that they can change the future. Junior’s ancestors were poor and now Junior and his family is poor. “And it’s not like my mother and father were born into wealth. It’s not like they...
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Poverty is the most important theme in Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, because it affected Junior’s life in a negative way. Poverty is the main theme because it affected the whole Indian community, Junior’s family, and Junior’s decisions. Poverty can affect you in many ways but to Junior, his family, and the whole Indian community in the reservation, poverty was a life threatening problem to them. Even so, poverty is a repeating cycle that will continue until you step out of that cycle and decide for yourself that that’s not the path you want to take. Poverty can happen to anyone, and everyone will experience poverty at some point. It’s up to you to decide whether you want to stay in poverty or not.
Works Cited
Alexie, Sherman. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
New York: Little Brown. 2007.
David K. Shipler in his essay At the Edge of Poverty talks about the forgotten America. He tries to make the readers feel how hard is to live at the edge of poverty in America. Shipler states “Poverty, then, does not lend itself to easy definition” (252). He lays emphasis on the fact that there is no single universal definition of poverty. In fact poverty is a widespread concept with different dimensions; every person, country or culture has its own definition for poverty and its own definition of a comfortable life.
To conclude, in the book The Absolutely True Diary of A Part-Time Indian an Indian boy shows how to escape the poverty of his Indian Reservation by going to a wealthy white school, as well as keeping his Indian Culture alive when living on the reservation.
The notion of poverty has a very expanded meaning. Although all three stories use poverty as their theme, each interprets it differently. Consequently, it does not necessarily mean the state of extreme misery that has been described in ?Everyday Use?. As Carver points out, poverty may refer to poverty of one?s mind, which is caused primarily by the lack of education and stereotyped personality. Finally, poverty may reflect the hopelessness of one?s mind. Realizing that no bright future awaits them, Harlem kids find no sense in their lives. Unfortunately, the satisfaction of realizing their full potential does not derive from achieving standards that are unachievable by others. Instead, it arises uniquely from denigrating others, as the only way to be higher than someone is to put this person lower than you.
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Have you ever wanted something really badly, but couldn’t afford it? This is a common occurrence, but what about food? Have you ever went to be hungry because you couldn’t afford to eat? Unfortunately, Junior, the main character in the book, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, felt exactly this way for food. Even though Junior didn’t have as many resources as the other “white kids,” he still chose to look at the positives. This novel shows that even in times of great hardship, people can still choose to have hope and look at the good in their lives.
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Poverty is a tremendous problem in the United States. Unfortunately, many of the families who are living in poverty have much more difficulty finding good jobs than those who are not. In The Working Poor, by David Shipler, there are many different circumstances that cause people to get to that point. Many of those in poverty have too many barriers in their way for them to be able to rise above the poverty line and support themselves. Some circumstances that cannot be avoided like disabilities or being born into a poor household can create biases that make it more difficult to get employment. Seeing what causes many to become impoverished and how some people were able to rise above the poverty line may be beneficial to others and possibly prevent
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Many fiction stories can commonly have a theme of poverty here and there, whether directly connected with the characters and plot or not. Mostly poverty is associated with the characters and their background and how they were raised. I have read many stories that were both non- fiction and fiction, where poverty is usually described with a back flash to the story, the character’s past and upbringing and how it resulted in them, the characters, to be where they are
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In conclusion, sometimes actions take place that changes a person’s outlook on life and as you can see poverty is one that can have a huge effect on not only one person, but also the people around him/ her.