Ashley Nelson Word Count: 654
English 100 L51
Instructor, Charley Duval
February 4, 2015
Alexie SWA # 1 In the short story “Superman and Me” by Sherman Alexie, he talks about being a 3 year old who lived on the Spokane Indian Reservation who loved to read. Alexie talks about the struggles that his family endures with money, but he doesn’t let that stop him from reading. Alexie learned to read from comic books such as “Superman”, he used the pictures to help tell the story. As he became older and started school he was teased because he was an Indian child who could read and write. Now, Alexie is a writer who visits schools to help Indian children to understand how reading had an impact on his life and he wants to try and get more Indian children involved with reading. Alexie describes his family as being poor but they are considered second class according to Reservation standards. As told in the story Alexie’s family consist of 7 family members and at least one parent held a job so the family could make it through a time where poverty was hitting the world hard. They lived on a combination of irregular paychecks, hope, fear, and government surplus food, but managed to be doing better than a lot of others in the reservation. The role of Alexie’s father played a huge role in his life. His father loved books and since Alexie loved is father with an aching devotion, he decided that he would love books also. Alexie’s father was one of the few Indians who attended a Catholic school, so I think that had a big impact on Alexie. He saw that his father would buy books by the pounds of random titles just so he could get more knowledge of the world around him. The metaphor Alexie uses is that he describes his family as a paragraph. He learned that a paragraph was a fence that held words and that the words inside the paragraph worked together for a common purpose. His family helped each other because no matter their situation or what happened in their lives they always found a way to work through it and survive. They lived in a time where family meant everything and everyone had to work together or they would never make it. A metaphor is a figure of speech in which the term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance, so Alexie used the