Write a 7 pages paper on the language of paradox by sherman alexie. The paradox is used to present contradictions, irony and highlight the implications in a situation, relationship, themes, and so on. The poem “On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City” by Sherman Alexie is analyzed based on Cleanth Brooks’ notion of paradox in the language of poetry.

Write a 7 pages paper on the language of paradox by sherman alexie. The paradox is used to present contradictions, irony and highlight the implications in a situation, relationship, themes, and so on. The poem “On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City” by Sherman Alexie is analyzed based on Cleanth Brooks’ notion of paradox in the language of poetry.

Sherman Alexie presents a Native American narrator in the poem. The title suggests that it is about an experience onboard a train from Boston to New York City, but the poem goes deeper than that. The poem opens with a reference to a “white woman”.

On the surface level, this is just an account of what the white woman said, her curiosity about a particularly old house and its historical significance. However, the meaning of the old house is different for the two people, the white woman and the native American. This difference is brought out in the following lines when the narrator says that American history:

As Cleanth Brooks says, “the terms are continually modifying each other, and thus violating their dictionary meanings” (p.9), the word “history” gets modified by the words “sits museum” to convey a fragmented meaning of history. Unlike what the white woman believes, history dates back thousands of years, which is ignored or simply forgotten. So the phrase “all the history” by the white woman, when she refers to the house becomes meaningless or contradictory to the idea of the narrator. The “old house” becomes a metaphor for the interpretation of American history by the whites and it being “museumed” is quite ironic.

Also, “past me” can be considered as a paradox here because the narrator stands evidence or representation of centuries-old American history, but the white woman notices something past the narrator, maybe missing the real ‘history’.