The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian

by Sherman Alexie, was one of the best books we've read this semester, by far. It was a heartbreaking and really funny story of a boy living on a reservation, who decides to go to school off reservation lands, where he is the only Native American--making him an outcast in both worlds. The insight into Native American lives was staggering--definitely a look at a culture that mainstream America has been trying to ignore, successfully, for over two hundred years.

The concept of intertextuality, a cultural studies mechanism for analyzing literature based on its place within literature, genre-wise, and in specific allusions to other texts, applies to Alexie's novel in many ways. First though, the most moving line in the novel, for me, was a reference to the opening of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." The speaker in Alexie's novel begs to differ--he says that on the reservation every family is unhappy, and it is for the same reason: alcohol. This claim is proven again and again with heartbreaking clarity throughout the novel.

But on a more "general" level, Alexie's novel is working within a multitude of genres, making its intertextual ties complicated indeed. The novel is marketed as a young adult novel, and it certainly has much to do with books about teenage protagonists coming-of-age, dealing with society's problems, aspiring to be more than their parents. It also fits in with Native American literature, determined to showcase the positives and negatives--the realities--of life as a "Part Time Indian." It is also a confessional work, within the "diary" tradition of writing, ala Sylvia Plath. On that same note, it is a semi-autobiographical novel for Alexie's real life--always an interesting study. Then, through the narrator's art work it also plays with the comic book tradition, through both traditional cartoons of characters and beautiful sketches hastily taped into the book's pages.

That The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian lies at the juncture of so many traditions is not what makes it incredible. However, the fact that it can use references to each of those traditions and tap into all the connotative associations inherent in them, DOES. Alexie uses all the genres that come together in his novel for its own enrichment. The reader falls into the rich, intertextual web of the book, and then emerges hours later, astonished by the wealth found within its "YA" covers.