Part-time identities and full-time narration as an absolution in Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Abstract

Belonging to a broad genre of Bildungsroman and a less broad literary form known as fictional diary, Sherman Alexie’s young-adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007) explores the implications of self-narration in the context of a painful search for a more unified and solid identity within a fragmented and stereotype-troubled social and political framework. The focus of this paper, therefore, is not only the protagonist’s psychological duality, generally inherent to the genre itself, but also the transformative power of the particularly hybrid and culturally pluralistic narrative that, in this case, effectively combines Native American and Anglo-European traditions. Drawing on the basic features of diary as a form of intensely autobiographical writing, the paper aims at pointing to its multiple therapeutic forces, as well as to the phenomenological importance of self-expression in artistic, political, and existential terms, as the words are, once again, seen as an agent of a world’s transformation.