When “Transitional” Isn’t Good Enough

Author: Kristen Tomanocy
Kristen’s #teachread Tumblr: parttimebrooklyn.tumblr.com
Categories: YA Lit, Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie, Web 2.0
Tags: Engaged Readers, Writing, Teens, YA Lit, Sherman Alexie, Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian, Identity, Self-Discovery, Social Justice, Literature, The Canon

When “Transitional” Isn’t Good Enough

In Sherman Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Junior is a capable protagonist. His honesty knocks you in the head with an empty liquor bottle in an almost hauntingly causal manner. Absolutely True Diary is at times inappropriate in a way that would make a politically-correct adult wince and a pre-teen beam with unharnessed pleasure. Sadly, a young adult (YA) book like this is not currently considered canonical on the reading lists of public school teachers in middle school and high school classrooms. Many YA books like this one are not considered to be canonical or “classics,” and I have theories about why that is.

A YA novel is not an account about a person’s most challenging life struggle, rather, a YA novel is an account of an adolescent’s struggle to find his or her identity in relation to the greater world he/she operates within. Often this is characterized by a struggle to accept the societal conventions placed upon all of us if we deign to accept the social contract pushed across the table to us at birth. Therefore, a YA novel seems to be about the character’s transition, not, as in other cases, the most challenging and main aspect of a character’s life, as in a typical adult novel. Examples of this are plenty, and include The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, Things Fall Apart, The Odyssey, Ulysses, and the list continues almost incessantly. Even in cases where the novel is considered an “adult novel” but the protagonist is young, the work is not considered “YA” because the protagonist has already accepted or begun to operate within his/her position in society against the backdrop of the storyline. Examples of this include The Catcher in the Rye, and even Hamlet.

In Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Junior has not accepted his surrounding society as the end-all-be-all, rather, he is in the midst of creating a society for himself, within which he can attend Reardan with the white kids, be a true Spokane Indian, and be best friends with Rowdy all at the same time. Unlike in Hamlet, wherein Hamlet finds himself arrested by the conventions surrounding honor and tradition when he tries to avenge his father’s unlawful death, Junior refuses to fit into the identity his society offers him. Junior illustrates the novel rather explicitly, and one of his self portraits in the beginning identifies the aspects of himself that would be visible to outside society: the fact that he has an excess of cerebral spinal fluid on his skull which can cause seizures, and is very awkwardly tall and knobby-kneed. But this image of Junior is merely the image in the beginning of the novel. By the end of the novel, readers may have a hard time picturing Junior being detained by any of these initial setbacks; he has overcome most, if not all of them, in the quest to define his own society within which he can peacefully exist with all of his social ‘abnormalities.’

Similar to YA books, Web 2.0 platforms are created as transition mediums of sorts. They are known for the ease with which one can “repost” or “reblog” others’ material, with minimal if any accreditation. Web 2.0 platforms are not a writer’s aspirational medium; they are the firing grounds upon which most struggling writers begin their processes of “getting noticed.” They are crammed with users who are amateurs in their fields, or otherwise not “serious” about what they are posting about. Therefore the feeling a blog or a social networking site warrants with regard to original work is an inconsistent one.

My thoughts in reconciling these two genres (Web 2.0 and YA literature) are that instead of demeaning their cultural value by comparing them to their separate counterparts (adult literature and the “classics;” published works in print form) we should form their own place in the society of English literature and the study of it so that Web 2.0 and YA will sit more comfortably. In Absolutely True Diary, Junior does not eventually pick either Reardan culture or his own Spokane culture, he decides that picking one is not good enough, and therefore struggles until he can define his own society. Then, once he has done this, he can situate the formation of his identity against the backdrop of a societal scaffold he himself has created. Although this cannot happen in all ‘canonical’ literature (What would The Odyssey look like if Odysseus decided that returning home to Ithaca was not the most important thing in the entire world and chose another pursuit?) I think it is a new way of looking at YA literature that makes it separate from adult literature, but more important than the perception of “transitional, angst-ridden teenage, life stage” reading material.