Absolutely True Dairy of a Part-Time Indian

The Poetic, and Decidedly Adult, Ending of the YA Novel ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN by Sherman Alexie

Hidden Messages: You can choose your own path if you are willing to take risks; poverty is a vicious cycle; life is beautiful and fleeting. 

Pleasure rating: 5/5 stars! I could not put this book down. 

Critical rating: 5/5 stars. Alexie gets his reader to question stereotypes, and he empowers young adults to choose the future they want for themselves.  

Would I buy this book for a child I know: Yes, and in fact, I got my department chair to buy it for 60 teenagers I know. Most of them loved the book! (I'm an English teacher, in case that wasn't clear from my book obsession.)

*spoiler alert!

In his novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie closes on the Spokane Indian Reservation’s basketball court, with a friendly game between Junior, the novel's protagonist, and his friend Rowdy. This reunion should provide a happy ending, a physical and emotional homecoming that the typical YA home-away-home structure usually allows for, but instead I was left with a sense of eternal wonder about the infinite possibilities that remain before Junior, and, well, all of us. I really dug this, but I am not sure if KIDS would be comforted by it, or even understand it. 

The mysterious air begins when Junior innocently asks if he and Rowdy will still know each other as old men. Rowdy’s answer, “Who knows anything?” leaves me in awe of the tiny, tiny fracture of life we humans occupy in our short span here on Earth. 

The lyrical narration that follows sustains this air of enigmatic uncertainty. The narrator seems to leap off the page at the very end, age by fifty years, and acknowledge that his diary has a deeper meaning:

We played until dark. We played until the streetlights lit up the court. We played until the bats swooped down at our heads. We played until the moon was huge and golden and perfect in the night sky.  

(Just as an aside, what poetry! It is clear here that this guy was a poet first. I had my students analyze just this slice of the novel along with some surrounding sentences, and man, there is enough here to write a whole essay on the human experience. Talk about effective word choice!)

The point of view is now that of an older, wiser person, retelling events from the distant, even eternal, past. Although Junior ends up at home on the reservation with his friend at the end, the aperture created by the phrase “who knows anything” leaves an open-ended, and, dare I say, very adult interpretation about what the future will bring.

That said, I love this novel, and so do my students! It's a great way to introduce the postcolonial and feminist lenses to young kids. Alexie definitely brings up stereotypes only to force us to question them. It's a fantastic book.