Rhetorical Analysis Of Superman And Me

Chanel Courant

"Superman and Me" Rhetorical Analysis

To your average white American kid, a comic book is cheap entertainment— a leisure, a novelty. Your run of the mill issue of "Superman," perhaps the most generic superhero of all, is something to be read once, maybe even merely skimmed, while in the bathroom or the doctors' office. When finished with it gets thrown away mindlessly or tossed aside to join a mounting stack of similarly abandoned stories of fantastical heroism. However in the eyes of the young Indian boy, Sherman Alexie, as depicted in his essay, "Superman and Me," a tattered comic found in a donation bin was much more than that— it was a life line.

Alexie describes in detail his formative experiences as a child, particularly

how he learned to read. He explains the moment in which he had the sudden epiphany that "a paragraph was a fence that held words" and that each paragraph "had some specific reason for being inside the same fence." He then began to take this new knowledge and see it as an analogy for everything in his life. The reservation he lived on, his house, his individual family members, each was their own paragraph. But if each paragraph had certain characteristics that confined them to their fence, what was Alexie's? There he was, growing up as an impoverished Indian kid whose family got by "on a combination of irregular pay checks, hope, fear, and government surplus food" and the sad truth of it was that the thing fencing him in was in large parts his race. Another analogy for this is seen in his "Superman" comic. He does not understand the meaning of the speech bubbles, but in the panel he can see a door shattering. This leads him to the conclusion that the words are saying that Superman is breaking down the door. Since Superman is the one doing the action, Alexie imagines him saying "I am breaking down the door." He then says himself, "I am breaking down the door." As Alexie learned to read by making up the words to this comic, he was not only rewriting the content of Superman's story, but in a bigger sense his own as well. The power of words and paragraphs were the things that enabled him to redefine what words applied to him and break free from these figurative fences.
While Alexie was thriving to burst through his paragraph and become his own Superman, many of his peers either had no need to fight this fight or were simply unwilling.

Alexie shows a strong difference between the treatment of Indian people versus the treatment of white people, and of Indian behavior in the non-Indian world versus in their own. A white kid reading classic English literature at the age of five was undeniably a "prodigy," whereas a change in skin tone would instead make that same kid an "oddity." Non-white excellence was taught to be viewed as volatile, as something incorrect. The use of this juxtaposition exemplifies and reveals the bias and racism faced by Alexie and Indian people everywhere by creating a stark and cruel contrast between perceptions of race. Indian kids were expected to stick to the background and only speak when spoken to. Those with some of the brightest, most curious minds answered in a single word at school but multiple paragraphs behind the comfort of closed doors, trained to save their energy and ideas for the privacy of home. The feistiest of the lot saw their sparks dulled when faced with a white adversary and those with the greatest potential were told that they had none. Their potential was confined to that six letter word, "Indian." This word had somehow become synonymous with failure, something which they had been taught was the only form of achievement they could ever reach. Acceptable and pitiable rejection from the

world.
However, Alexie refused to allow this to be the case for himself. The hardware programmed into his fellow peers to view themselves as lesser was overrided in his brain by a statement both simple and powerful. He repeats it over and over, "I was smart. I was arrogant. I was lucky." Arrogant is an adjective which generally possesses a negative connotation, one implying scorn and a sense of narcissism. But for a young Indian boy, arrogance is much more than that. It is an act of defiance, a badge Alexie boldly sports, because he knows it is rare for someone like him and it is important. He does what others were afraid to do, he uses his arrogance and his intelligence as a means of escape. He makes up the words to the story and through this truly learns what it means. He reads feverently, listing off all the dozens of sorts of things he would tackle, saying "I read... I read... I was trying to save my life" until your head is spinning. It's piercing, it's "equal parts joy and desperation." Like a heartbeat it pulses through the narrative. He is not merely reading but devouring, flinging himself forward with pure might, based solely on his knowledge and his words. Through this he was able to escape the fence, but once free he could still see all the others like him still trapped between the indent and final period of their paragraph. He sees them with their "bright eyes and arrogant wonder." He sees them and he tosses them a rope to safety. He holds up the books and the worlds they contain. He says it again but this time the pronoun had shifted to reach the reader. "I am trying to save our lives."
"Superman and Me" is an essay intended to be eye opening for two different perspectives. For the next generation of Native Americans, Alexie is begging that they be strong, that they be arrogant. He is reaching out a hand to the shameful geniuses and timid fighters. He is showing them that it is possible to not only survive but thrive in a world not catered towards them. He is providing them with solidarity, providing them with hope, and a way to the other side. For the broader white audience, Alexie is hoping to provide insight to his culture and the experiences of someone lacking the privilege they inherently possess. It ultimately makes for a vital account for those ignorant and those all too aware of the inequality of race set in place by society.