A Critique of Sherman Alexie’s
The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me
Expectations can alter a person’s ability to establish an outcome of choice. Society determines the role that every individual must adapt to in accordance to age, gender, sexual preference, race, ethnicity, and/or class. The struggle to define a unique entity can be overshadowed by the constant pressure to conform to the prototypical stereotype of human classification. A common example to this implementation is that Hispanics are lazy. A simple phrase like such can make the difference between surpassing the judgments and merely adjusting to life as a sluggish creature. In Sherman Alexie’s piece, The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me, he excels the anticipated part portrayed by life’s discriminative system through the passion of obtaining knowledge from books.
The author wanted the audience to be able to understand his view of equality by sharing his life story. He’s a Spokane Indian who grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern Washington State to a low/middle-class family that consisted of a mother, father, older brother and three sisters (pg. 11). The intention of emplacing the information in his introduction paragraph is for the audience to appeal to culture; it establishes the background and the reliability of the author to connect with the reader. He organizes his piece in a chronological structure. The beginning sentences foreshadow an event of his life and it opens a sequential form of narrative arrangement. He could not recall exactly what issue or plot from the Superman comic book he had read, but he knew that he learned to read thanks to it (pg. 11). Yet he expresses that reading is not an enjoyment or an ability that is restricted to a high level of income or class by saying:
He [author’s father] 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...