Observations:

• He wasn’t exactly interested in the Super hero “superman”, the comic book just happened to be what he first read
• He decided to love reading because his father loved to read
• He began to see things rationally, or in paragraphs and compare the real world life as a story written in paragraphs
• He first learned to read by interpreting pictures in his own words
• He talks about his person as being seen as a stereotype in the community that he grew up in
• He chose to prove that stereotype wrong
• He seems to be the first of his kind to do what he has done and break the stereotype of his Indian culture

2 Compelling Moments:

• I found it Interesting when he said “Those who failed were ceremonially accepted by other Indians and appropriately pitied by non-Indians.” Indians like himself were expected to fail as if it was the norm to follow what every indian has been doing for years, which is fail, and when they did fail they were applauded as if there was nothing better they could have done.
• I also found it compelling when he repeated, “I loved those books, but I also knew that love had only one purpose. I was trying to save my life.” He was trying to save his life from the life that awaited him; A poor indian who doesn’t succeed in the big world full of knowledge that everyone was capable of learning something from and just obeying the orders and negative criticism of the non-indians.

Question about the text:

• Did he choose to read everything that he can get his hands on because he thought everything he read was some type of knowledge?

Author’s Purpose:

I believe Sherman Alexie’s main purpose in this text is to emphasize how important it is to become who you want to become and not live by the norm or the stereotype that society places on our cultures. There are many people who don’t know how to start stepping out of that stereotypical zone simply because they don’t how to take the first step. In this reading Alexie explains that the first step doesn’t have to be the most difficult one. In his case, the first step was simply picking up a random comic book and start interpreting pictures. Alexie tries to further pass this idea by going back to his older schools and trying to teach the children who are now in the position he was many years ago, that the key to all knowledge is in Books.