Chan 1 Derek Chan Professor Collin Ludlow-Mattson English 114 19 October 2013 Identity Change In everyday situationall people are faced with some interaction with other people. When we build many interactions over our lifetime we build what we know as our personal identity. This identity is accumulated of many different aspects of one‟s life that they personally want to be known as. But with this identity sometimes we are not satisfied with what we are calling ourselves and associating ourselves with. When we are not satisfied we want to do something about it, therefore we are forced to change it. Arnold Spirit, the main character in Sherman Alexie‟s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, is presented with major identity changes through his time breaking away from his reservation and through these changes he uses code switching—a type of action explained by Gene Demby in „How Code Switching Explains the World‟. In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, the main character Arnold Spirit is pressured by his culture, and results into major identity change through acts of code switching. Code switching in Arnold Spirit‟s life is the act of changing into something that is never expected of him. We see in the novel that Arnold changes his character and persona in order to create a new identity. Arnold growing up on an Indian Reservation everybody around him believed he would stay on the reservation and live a pointless and meaningless life. He was never expected to anything extraordinary in his life, nothing was expected of him but only being just like everybody else in the reservation. His pressures around Chan 2 him only led him to failure, but Arnold wanted change. Arnold Spirit is a young teenage boy who was born into poverty, and did not have any hopes of life beyond his Indian reservation. But as he grew older Arnold wanted better for himself, so he decided to leave the reservation and transfer high schools to a school outside the reservation. He did this so he could attempt to become better than his past. But as a kid on the reservation Arnold was never the person to be known as “popular” or “outgoing”. Arnold Spirit was just your average school nerd on the reservation. But with this opportunity for him be able to start fresh and become whomever he wanted to be Arnold decided to change his identity and persona when he attended his new school off the reservation. We see in this novel many situations of where Arnold changes in identity in order to prove to himself and the readers that he wants to make a change in who he is. When first attending to his new school, Reardan, he was already an outcast due to the fact that Reardan was an all white school. He begins the day and is already noticed, and when he is known as an outsider he becomes treated like one. A boy from Reardan named Roger decided to make Arnold‟s day even worse when he began to bully Arnold. He began using derogatory terms and used them to insult Arnold. He insults Arnold comparing his culture with black people and buffalo and insulting all three of them without remorse. Roger and his gang of friends wanted to break down Arnold and send him back to his reservation. In normal circumstances Arnold would take the insults and not do anything about them. But Arnold wanted to turn the tables around and become the big shot, and therefore altered his character in this situation. “Roger and his friends were laughing like crazy. I hated them. And I knew I had to do something big. I couldn‟t let them get away with that shit. I wasn‟t just defending myself. I was defending Indians, black people, and buffalo. So I punched Roger in the face” (65). Sherman Alexie wanted us to know that even though Arnold was described and depicted as the kid who could be pushed around, but Alexie Chan 3 changed that when Arnold broke out of his shy shell and became a person nobody but him knew whom he could be. We see how in this first interaction with people outside of his reservation, Arnold becomes something he is normally never like, before his switch to a new school Arnold was a quiet and nonchalant guy, but at Reardan he became something completely different. We call this act code switching. In Gene Demby‟s „How Code Switching Explains the World‟ he explains code switching as a change in your dialogue and character that spans from different cultures, to start interactions with broader amounts of people. Most people see a code switch as a small subtle thing that happens between interactions with one another, but Demby explains how it is known through many more occasions. “Linguists would probably quibble with our definition. (The term arose in linguistics specifically to refer to mixing languages and speech patterns in conversation.) But we‟re looking at code-switching a little more broadly: many of us subtly reflexively change the way we express ourselves all the time.” Demby argues that most code switching definitions are only based on language and what comes out of our mouth, but he proves that through many different occasions it is also more on how we express ourselves through character. In communicating yourself to others through language us is very helpful, but the concept of character is more complex and powerful. Character switching is not only just the change in the way you speak, but also the way you hold yourself as a person. It is the way you interact with others, the way you express your emotions, and the way you see yourself as. In Demby‟s writing he uses different examples of code switching through character changes. For example, Demby shows a video clip of the very successful singer Beyoncè Knowles in nonprofessional environment acting like any normal person would act when around your friends. Chan 4 Society on the other hand sees Beyoncè majorly as a very professional and formal person, but with code switching we see an actual character switch instead of just a linguistic switch. Another reason why we code switch is to feel comfortable with one another. We know that since Arnold is Indian he has a racial barrier between himself and the white kids at his new school. Arnold is not accustomed to certain ways that go around at the new school, and therefore he must learn basically a new language in order to feel comfortable talking with the kids at the school. Arnold is introduced to a very beautiful girl at his school and sometimes he is nervous whenever speaking to her, but in this instance he uses his reservation language to communicate with her thus causing confusing between the two characters. “„Hey,‟ she said. „I asked you where you‟re from.‟ Wow, she was tough. „Wellpinit,‟ I said. „Up on the rez, I mean, the reservation‟”(61). We see how that Arnold is used to saying certain things and is not accustomed to people not knowing what he says. So when he corrects himself from saying reservation instead of saying rez, we notice a code switch happening in the way Arnold talks. This code switch allows Arnold to be more comfortable and more appealing to talk to compared to if he were to stick to his old language. The code-switching going on with Arnold is growing more and more prevalent each time he has newer experiences with people from his new school. We see the code switching happening all the time now with Arnold and because of this he is learning to create a newer identity. Before he was the Indian on the reservation stuck in his old slangs and attitudes, but we are noticing him to become a different person now that he is spending more time with people outside of his old past. Gene Demby explains this as a normal thing to be doing. Demby knows that code switching creates more ways for people to feel comfortable and therefore does understand why Arnold Spirit can be going through his identity change. “The point is, code- Chan 5 switching is apparent in all the myriad ways we interact with one another and try to feel each other out.” Gene Demby says that we see code switching in every situation. We use it to interact with one another so that we can feel conformed and in touch with the other person. With the identity changes in Arnold Spirit growing larger and large, we must know that code switching is the largest and most prominent reason for his identity change. As the first year at the new school grew deeper into the year, Arnold realized more and more about himself as a person integrating himself away from his past. Arnold Spirit went into the school trying to find something new in his life, and as the year continued he began to notice how much he was changing from only such a short period of time. “I woke up on the reservation as an Indian, and somewhere on the road to Reardan, I became something less than Indian. And once I arrived at Reardan, I became something less than less than less than Indian” (83). Arnold Spirit made a distinct effort to change who he was to others. He impressed all people at his school as well as people at home and everybody seem to notice the changed man that Arnold had become. He changed the way he spoke and acted, using code switching to be the reason for it. The code-switching concept for us is now greatly known and we see it across the affairs of language, character, and it also plays into race, ethnicity, and culture. We know for Arnold that with his new identity he wants to obtain this and be known for it through both of his Indian life as well as his school life. Gene Demby again explains why Arnold continues his code switching. “When you‟re attuned to the phenomenon of code-switching, you start to see it everywhere, and you begin to see the way race, ethnicity, and culture plays out all over the place.” Demby explains that once you are accustomed to code switching it is like second nature and that it will be seen in the way you act with race, ethnicity, and culture. Just like how Arnold Chan 6 changed the way he acted and changed the way he spoke to others, he grew to change the way he was culturally different and how he presented himself to other people at his new school. After we analyze what both Sherman Alexie and Gene Demby are both saying in their text we know that they both relate to each other and how they correspond to code switching. In my opinion, Sherman Alexie put a display of code switching in its broad spectrum through the use of his main character Arnold Spirit. Also Gene Demby explains the different varieties of code switching and how they can be explained through our every day lives. I both believe that each text agrees with each other and how they both relate to code switching, and that they correspond with each other very well. These texts both apply to each other with their textual and definitional explanation of code switching. In conclusion, we know that with changes in identity we are presented with the term code switching. The code switching that happens with the main character Arnold Spirit is greatly impacting to his identity changes and how he perceives himself. We are shown through the different scenes in the novel by Sherman Alexie that identity change in Arnold Spirit is present and always changing because of the code switches going on in his life. We are also shown through the different definitions and explanations of Gene Demby‟s article that their prevalence in code switching in each and every single situation in our daily lives. When we are interacting with all different people in our lives we use code switching to fit in, feel comfortable, and to change your identity. Chan 7 Work Cited Alexie, Sherman. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. N.p.: Hachette Digital, 2012. Print. Demby, Gene. "How Code-Switching Explains The World." Npr. KQED, 08 Apr. 2013. Web. 28 Aug. 2013. <http://www.npr.org/>.