Ashley Word Count: 654
English 100 L51
February 4, 2015
Alexie SWA # 1 In the short story “Superman and Me” by Sherman Alexie, he talks about being a 3 year old who lived on the Spokane Indian Reservation who loved to read. Alexie talks about the struggles that his family endures with money, but he doesn’t let that stop him from reading. Alexie learned to read from comic books such as “Superman”, he used the pictures to help tell the story. As he became older and started school he was teased because he was an Indian child who could read and write. Now, Alexie is a writer who visits schools to help Indian children to understand how reading had an impact on his life and he wants to try and get more Indian children involved with reading. Alexie describes his family as being poor but they are considered second class according to Reservation standards. As told in the story Alexie’s family consist of 7 family members and at least one parent held a job so the family could make it through a time where poverty was hitting the world hard. They lived on a combination of irregular paychecks, hope, fear, and government surplus food, but managed to be doing better than a lot of others in the reservation. The role of Alexie’s father played a huge role in his life. His father loved books and since Alexie loved is father with an aching devotion, he decided that he would love books also. Alexie’s father was one of the few Indians who attended a Catholic school, so I think that had a big impact on Alexie. He saw that his father would buy books by the pounds of random titles just so he could get more knowledge of the world around him. The metaphor Alexie uses is that he describes his family as a paragraph. He learned that a paragraph was a fence that held words and that the words inside the paragraph worked together for a common purpose. His family helped each other because no matter their situation or what happened in their lives they always found a way to work through it and survive. They lived in a time where family meant everything and everyone had to work together or they would never make it. A metaphor is a figure of speech in which the term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance, so Alexie used the paragraph metaphor to describe his family because they were all different in their own ways. Alexie’s education became very important to him because he wanted to be one of the few Indians who would graduate and become something of himself. He never gave up and now has become an acclaimed poet, novelist, and short story writer. Alexie now uses his education to go to different Indian schools to help the children get more involved with reading. He uses his past experiences to help the Indian children that they should never give up and go with they love to do. One set back that Alexie faced was that he was a smart Indian and his classmates taunted him throughout school. His own words were, “A smart Indian is a dangerous person”. The Indian children were expected to be stupid and uneducated but also they were the ones who were accepted by other Indians and it was very hard for Alexie because he excelled over the other children, but he refused to fail! I think Alexie lived a hard life but he managed to be strong and had a lot of will power to achieve his goals, even though he had it rough in the schools he became a successful writer. Now he wants to share his life story and help other Indian children achieve their goals and never give up.