Superman and Me Sherman Alexie Group C
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Superman and Me Sherman Alexie
- I learned to read with a Superman comic book. Simple enough, I suppose. I cannot recall which particular Superman comic book I read, nor can I remember which villain he fought in that issue. I cannot remember the plot, nor the means by which I obtained the comic book. What I can remember is this: I was 3 years old, a Spokane Indian boy living with his family on the Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern Washington state. We were poor by most standards, but one of my parents usually managed to find some minimum-wage job or another, which made us middle-class by reservation standards. I had a brother and three sisters. We lived on a combination of irregular paychecks, hope, fear and government surplus food.
Often times, stories about someone’s life starts off with the best thing that happened to them. For Sherman, this would imply that reading was the greatest tool that he acquired which means that the rest of the piece must be about life as a reader and the impact of reading on his life.
Learning was a major accomplishment in his life, he was able to be at a higher level than his classmates. The Superman comic is significant because he taught himself to read; this opened a new world for him.
i agree. he made sure to include what was in the comic book wasn’t important and it was all about what accomplishment he made.
This shows that his neighbors and community members really struggled to obtain basic necessities. Reservation life is hard and is given nothing with little opportunities for advancement.Having little with a smaller education keeps the kids poor with a mentality that they cannot advance in the future and their reservation will stay the way it is. Sherman was destined to get out of his situation and took opportunities like excessive reading to assure his future was going to be something great.
Maybe the other people in the reservation are metaphorically poor because they can’t read
He says that he lived on hope and fear instead of just little money and food. This means that they cared about their future. They wanted better instead of living off of the government system and just enough money to get by. Fear and Hope are great adjectives. This would imply that Sherman and his family lived constantly scared about making ends meet yet were driven to keep on trying because of hope that something would change like a full time job or better conditions for themselves and their people.
- My father, who is one of the few Indians who went to Catholic school on purpose, was an avid reader of westerns, spy thrillers, murder mysteries, gangster epics, basketball player biographies and anything else he could find. He bought his books by the pound at Dutch's Pawn Shop, Goodwill, Salvation Army and Value Village. When he had extra money, he bought new novels at supermarkets, convenience stores and hospital gift shops. Our house was filled with books. They were stacked in crazy piles in the bathroom, bedrooms and living room. In a fit of unemployment-inspired creative energy, my father built a set of bookshelves and soon filled them with a random assortment of books about the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, the Vietnam War and the entire 23-book series of the Apache westerns. My father loved books, and since I loved my father with an aching devotion, I decided to love books as well.
Alexie is trying to show and justify why he became a writer. Since his father became an avid reader, so did Alexie. “They were stacked in crazy piles in the bathroom, bedrooms and living room…” This shows descriptive and creative writing to show how his father’s influence and liking of books on Alexie. Also the convenience of having books would also have been a factor in Alexie becoming a writer. Alexie is even shown in later paragraphs to show how he read anything he could get his hands on. “My father loved books, and since I loved my father with an aching devotion, I decided to love books as well” This last sentence helps prove my point further and shows Alexie being influenced by his father and shows a deep respect and love for his father. Alexie repeats my father, does this mean that he is doing it in respect? Or scared that people will know who his father is, why can’t Alexie just use his name?
This quote shows a descriptive use of writing to show how avid of a writer his father was. This could also be seen as how desperate his father was to read a book.
- I can remember picking up my father's books before I could read. The words themselves were mostly foreign, but I still remember the exact moment when I first understood, with a sudden clarity, the purpose of a paragraph. I didn't have the vocabulary to say "paragraph," but I realized that a paragraph was a fence that held words. The words inside a paragraph worked together for a common purpose. They had some specific reason for being inside the same fence. This knowledge delighted me. I began to think of everything in terms of paragraphs. Our reservation was a small paragraph within the United States. My family's house was a paragraph, distinct from the other paragraphs of the LeBrets to the north, the Fords to our south and the Tribal School to the west. Inside our house, each family member existed as a separate paragraph but still had genetics and common experiences to link us. Now, using this logic, I can see my changed family as an essay of seven paragraphs: mother, father, older brother, the deceased sister, my younger twin sisters and our adopted little brother.
- At the same time I was seeing the world in paragraphs, I also picked up that Superman comic book. Each panel, complete with picture, dialogue and narrative was a three-dimensional paragraph. In one panel, Superman breaks through a door. His suit is red, blue and yellow. The brown door shatters into many pieces. I look at the narrative above the picture. I cannot read the words, but I assume it tells me that "Superman is breaking down the door." Aloud, I pretend to read the words and say, "Superman is breaking down the door." Words, dialogue, also float out of Superman's mouth. Because he is breaking down the door, I assume he says, "I am breaking down the door." Once again, I pretend to read the words and say aloud, "I am breaking down the door" In this way, I learned to read.
Once the reader is immersed he will bypass his limits and guess what is being said based on the pictures; in this way his learning is three-dimensional and super-cedes conventional methods as it is based on past experiences not regurgitation. In this way his learning is an allegory for a panel as it is multifaceted and three dimensional. In the same way if you know two dimensions of a rectangle you can figure out the third; he finds out what is written by observing the pictures and story.
This emphasizes his limits, and sets up Superman as a symbol for achievement, for everything he does the reader is more inspired to learn how to read. How much does Superman inspire this reader?
i think that he made it very clear the details of the book were not the things that mattered. in a way i believe the"superman" could even be his own father.the one that pushed books and reading into his life from a young age.
this solidifies not only the character’s identity but has another parallel to superman as the sentence before superman accomplishes his first feat breaking down the door as the reader opens one by making an inference.
this also denotes a tone shift from negative blockage to positive action.
- This might be an interesting story all by itself. A little Indian boy teaches himself to read at an early age and advances quickly. He reads "Grapes of Wrath" in kindergarten when other children are struggling through "Dick and Jane." If he'd been anything but an Indian boy living on the reservation, he might have been called a prodigy. But he is an Indian boy living on the reservation and is simply an oddity. He grows into a man who often speaks of his childhood in the third-person, as if it will somehow dull the pain and make him sound more modest about his talents.
- A smart Indian is a dangerous person, widely feared and ridiculed by Indians and non-Indians alike. I fought with my classmates on a daily basis. They wanted me to stay quiet when the non-Indian teacher asked for answers, for volunteers, for help. We were Indian children who were expected to be stupid. Most lived up to those expectations inside the classroom but subverted them on the outside. They struggled with basic reading in school but could remember how to sing a few dozen powwow songs. They were monosyllabic in front of their non-Indian teachers but could tell complicated stories and jokes at the dinner table. They submissively ducked their heads when confronted by a non-Indian adult but would slug it out with the Indian bully who was 10 years older. As Indian children, we were expected to fail in the non-Indian world. Those who failed were ceremonially accepted by other Indians and appropriately pitied by non-Indians.
Alexie is making the audeience feel as if their is a lump in their stomach for mistreating a race of people. He is telling us his personal perspective. How he has been feared and called dumb and taught not to speak for he is an indian and he is wrong.He has had the door slammed in his face away from the opportunities that were equally his own. It is a very powerful text and he goes beneath the surface when he uses they to show what they were expected to do or to be, but when he uses we it shows who they don’t get to be and who they really are.
These three words are all being used to describe the Native Americans. As if they are some caged animal who should be feared because they are “so scary” and this gives them the right to not be wanted to learn. This also confuses me because how could you begin to describe a person in such a way.
The description of the Indian as SMART, is the biggest point in this paragraph. To be smart is to have power over others. Something non-Indians didn’t want Indians to have.
If they knew they were smart, why didn’t they show that to the non-Indians? They weren’t talking how they usually did, they’d talk how they thought the non-Indians wanted them to
Why does Alexie write this paper as if everything is related to failure and hiding…. He writes that the Indians cannot truly be themselves and they are held back by the non-Indian race. But my question is, are the Indians the ones holding them selves back by not stepping out and using what’s held against them so that they can fight to learn and prove how smart and equal they really are?
he was taught by most people he was surrounded by that he would fail when leaving the community. to me this shows how much more determination he had to be successful. instead of letting this shape his future he let what he loved to do, reading, determine where he would go in life.
- I refused to fail. I was smart. I was arrogant. I was lucky. I read books late into the night, until I could barely keep my eyes open. I read books at recess, then during lunch, and in the few minutes left after I had finished my classroom assignments. I read books in the car when my family traveled to powwows or basketball games. In shopping malls, I ran to the bookstores and read bits and pieces of as many books as I could. I read the books my father brought home from the pawnshops and secondhand. I read the books I borrowed from the library. I read the backs of cereal boxes. I read the newspaper. I read the bulletins posted on the walls of the school, the clinic, the tribal offices, the post office. I read junk mail. I read auto-repair manuals. I read magazines. I read anything that had words and paragraphs. I read with equal parts joy and desperation. I loved those books, but I also knew that love had only one purpose. I was trying to save my life.
This is what makes a strong reader, is reading a lot and he knew that. There is a bit of resentment in his words. He wanted to better himself to prove people wrong.
- Despite all the books I read, I am still surprised I became a writer. I was going to be a pediatrician. These days, I write novels, short stories, and poems. I visit schools and teach creative writing to Indian kids. In all my years in the reservation school system, I was never taught how to write poetry, short stories or novels. I was certainly never taught that Indians wrote poetry, short stories and novels. Writing was something beyond Indians. I cannot recall a single time that a guest teacher visited the reservation. There must have been visiting teachers. Who were they? Where are they now? Do they exist? I visit the schools as often as possible. The Indian kids crowd the classroom. Many are writing their own poems, short stories and novels. They have read my books. They have read many other books. They look at me with bright eyes and arrogant wonder. They are trying to save their lives. Then there are the sullen and already defeated Indian kids who sit in the back rows and ignore me with theatrical precision. The pages of their notebooks are empty. They carry neither pencil nor pen. They stare out the window. They refuse and resist. "Books," I say to them. "Books," I say. I throw my weight against their locked doors. The door holds. I am smart. I am arrogant. I am lucky. I am trying to save our lives.
He’s blaming the school system for his people believing that the non-Indians were better and that they had to lower their abilities for them. That’s not the reservations doing, that’s their own.
There is a trilogy of sentences like this, which shows that if you allow people to learn or give them the opportunity to learn new things, they will, for the most part, take it. There are obviously but for the main part they all are hungry for knowledge to they are able to better themselves and others.
This is a connection to last sentence of paragraph 8. He was not bettering himself for his own wants and needs he was bettering himself for others. He grew up being put down for who he was, and he wanted to prevent other children from feeling that way. So, he teaches and writes.
This is an identifier for me as it says more about him than the kids he’s teaching If he had these limits and wants to minimize them for kids that are like he once was. (I.E. police officers who used to be in gangs are now very tough on crime.)
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when alexie says “i loved those books,but i also knew that love only had one purpose. i was trying to save my life.” was he saying this because he knew it would better him as a person or because without books he would not truly be living? he he being literal or is he meaning for us to think beyond those words?
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