Brainstorming – Narrative Elements

After re-reading Sherman Alexie’s article Superman and Me, I picked up on some of his narrative elements that he used in his writing in order to keep his readers locked in and also to make his writing better. One of the methods I noticed was that he uses imagery. When talking about how he was learning to read, he said “I realized that a paragraph was a fence that held words” as he says this, your mind automatically pictures that sight, and helps you better understand Alexie as a learner. It also gives you a new viewpoint on how to look at the structure of a paragraph. Another element that he used was repetition. In the second to last paragraph, Alexie uses the phrase “I read” eleven times. I believe he does this to emphasize all the hard work he put in to teaching himself how to read, and to get to where he is today he read whatever was in his path. The last thing I noticed about the article was a possible conflict that Alexie faced as a learner. He states, “We were Indian children who were expected to be stupid.” This could have been a conflict for him because, being just a boy, he probably didn’t want to challenge what was supposed to be. He didn’t want to create ripples in his classroom by proving to his classmates that Indian children could also be smart, sometimes smarter than other students.