When a person has a friendship, you must be there for the other person. This is one of the main themes in the novel by Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. This story is about a Native American boy named Junior. Junior lives with his mom, dad, sister, and grandmother on a Native American reservation in Wyoming along with his best friend Rowdy. After a long day of school one day when junior gets home, with the help of his strange teacher, he decides that he doesn’t belong where he is for mainly two reasons, the number of friends he has and, the amount of respect he gets. He then decides that he should be switched to a different school, so he does. Of course, Rowdy is more than upset, he is a big guy and he doesn’t get upset very often. This whole switching school thing ends their friendship and that is the last thing junior wanted. Thus, making the theme “It’s not always easy to keep a friendship, but if you aren’t there for the other person it will never work.”
When Junior left Rowdy it practically crushed him and that’s the last thing that junior wanted. “My heart broke into fourteen pieces, one for each year that Rowdy and I had been best”. Right before that, Junior had told Rowdy that he was switching schools, and all junior could think of, is how he lost his best friend. “Don’t touch me, you r******d f*g!' he yelled” (Alexie 52). Wherefore, when Rowdy said this to Junior, he was mad enough to not even think and this causes junior to be upset therefore making the friendly, sometimes bad, relationship, ruined. Above all, this means they will not even talk to each other. So then, they don’t even have a chance to get better.
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After Rowdy and Junior stopped being friends, I noticed that Rowdy was equally upset as junior and they both had two different ways of grieving. Junior's way of grieving is more of a being sad way and Rowdy’s way is more of an anger way and it is perfectly shown a way of how this is true in the letters they have written. 'And you'll cry like the little f****t you are.' (197), which was written in one of the letters. Junior writes “A few days after basketball season ended, I e-mailed Rowdy and told him I was sorry that we beat them so bad and that their season went to h*** after that” (197). So basically, Junior has a very calm, kinder, and all more apologetic way of talking. In comparison to, Rowdy acts like he is entitled to be mean. In summary, these letters seem to sound like Junior is more sympathetic to Rowdy when trying to fix their broken friendship.
Overall, when in a friendship, make sure you care for the other person. This quote has many things connected to the story, but it even better connects to how Rowdy and Junior treat each other. Hence coming up with this theme, I decided to think about how I treat my friends, and how they treat me because once you think about this, you begin to realize who true friends are. I really think the author was trying to emphasize being kind to your friend and to make sure that they are nice to you, it really could connect to anybody in the world as well. In order to find out who true friends are, think about how nice they really are.
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