Resumo de My Name Is Aram - William Saroyan

Aram,
a rambunctious, irrepressible, nine-year-old boy introduces us to the immigrant
Armenian community in the rural Fresno
area while leading the reader on adventures and escapades of his daily life.

Saroyan burst upon the literary scene with the publication
of The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze which brought him instantaneous
success in 1934. The stories of Aram
Garoghlanian and his wildly memorable extended family appeared first as a
series in the Atlantic Monthly. The characters are unforgettable. Zany dialogues and snappy repartee distinguish the
characters that populate Saroyan's rural California.
His writing stands in stark contrast with his contemporary, John Steinbeck,
with it's wacky humor and hilarious solutions for daily dilemmas.

Confronting economic hardship, newcomers to America
frequently sought manual labor in order
to sustain themselves and provide the bare necessities of food and shelter,
oftentimes living in crowded conditions with cousins and grandparents under the
same roof. Arriving from the Old
Country, they were accustomed to finding means of survival, taking low-paying
jobs in agricultural labor: hoeing fields, picking strawberries and watermelons
to scrounge subsistence living. Uncle Jorgi, the zither-player, gets nominated
as the fool of the family to be exiled to Hanford
for field labor. Unreliable to be entrusted alone in this mission, the family
council debates on selecting his
companion. Aram
is chosen, not for his dexterity for picking watermelons, but for cooking rice
which is graded in three catagories: swill, light or salty. His rice is
catagorically correct since it is classed by all three descriptions; but he is
sent because he is the pest of the family, notorious for playing tricks on the
unwary members.

Uncle Melik, melancholic for the Old World,
saves his hard-earned money to invest it into
infertile land. He plants orchards of pomegranates into hard, unyielding
soil with the dreams of flowering trees and filling the new country with beauty,
but the local inhabitants are unwilling to buy the strange new fruit, finding
it a bit too seedy for their tastes.
Complications arise when Aram tries to calculate the number of
rattlesnakes per acre that populate his uncle's real estate in an effort to
deter him from his scheme of planting
peaches, figs and pomegranate orchards.

Like all ambitious kids, Aram
dreams to excel in something. His fantasies take form when he spies an
advertisement in Argosy All-Story Magazine for becoming the strongest man in
the world. Beguiled by the photograph of
Lionel Strongfort, the muscle-bound giant with the greatest chest expansion in
the world, he sends the coupon to New
York to receive the secrets of Strongfort's
success. Frustrated by the financial
demands of the training program, he nevertheless pursues his goal on a modified
scale. Encouraged by intermittant correspondence from New
York and his Uncle Gyko, who had taken up Oriental
philosophy and attaining nirvana through the release of mysterious vital forces
and vibrating, Aram
enters a local race sponsored by Longfellow
School. If not the strongest man in the world, he
will at least be the champion of the Fifty Yard
Dash. Saroyan uses ordinary dreams and goals for witty parables
that provide acute insight to human nature.

Aram's
character is developed through his interaction with his various relatives
within the large extended family. The stories reflect the cultural diversity
existing in California during
the mid-nineteenth century and the daily
obstacles that immigrants face. Cousin
Arak is a mischievous prankster who systematically disrupts classes and uses
methods that routinely leave Aram
the victim of teacher-principal punishment. A family cluttered with eccentircs
allows no time for boredom as readers explore the daily life and private exploits of Aram's
wld where boys go skinny-dipping in irrigation ditches at the first signs of
spring.

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