Being literate is something that you and I are capable of, if not we wouldn’t be able to get through this essay. In American society, being able to read and write is superior to any form of communication and is the norm for most. What if I told you about two individuals who were not as fortunate and were incapable of these skills? Who were deemed unworthy and too oppressed to learn to read and write through the normal route? Sherman Alexie and Frederick Douglass were the two people mentioned, they were people who were determined and sought out their own passage in learning these skills. In “Learning to Read and Write’’, Douglass focuses on overcoming the challenges of having to teach himself literacy as an enslaved man, on the other hand, Alexie’s essay, “Superman and Me”, focuses on the obstacles of him …show more content…
However, this is not how he learns to read. He learns to read by making friends with the little white boys on the streets who would teach him. In exchange, he would provide them with bread. That is only the beginning of his journey. He starts reading all types of books and eventually learns about the abolition movement and why he was a slave, which infuriates him and also makes me feel hopeless. Eventually, his next mission is to learn to write, he learns to write by tricking the white neighborhood kids into writing competitions and obtaining the letters necessary to write. He would also use the book of his young master when he was not home and copy down the letters, thus leading him to the accomplishment of learning to read and write all on his own will and doing. In Sherman Alexie's essay, he goes straight to the point that he learned to read through Superman comic books. He doesn't know quite what the words say on the page, but he infers through the picture and this is how he learns to read. Alexie was a young boy living on an Indian Spokane reservation with lower standards of