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The Symbolism Of Melinda's Tree In Speak By Halse Anderson

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Imagine being through a traumatic event and didn’t know how to tell someone, or maybe not had anyone to talk to about how you were feeling? That's how Melinda Sordino felt as the main character in the book Speak by Halse Anderson. Melinda was going through the hells of highschool alone after being raped at a party, and ditched by all of her friends who she thought cared about her. She is bullied, harassed, picked on, and failing all of her classes. Except for art class where she finds the only place that she feels safe anymore. Their teacher, Mr. Freeman assigns the class a year-long project to pick a random object and turn it into a real piece of art. Melinda’s object was a tree. As the year goes on her art develops and her tree does as well. And by the end of the year when she has begun to fully heal and move past what happened to her, her tree is finished, and a beautiful piece of art. Melinda’s tree is brought up throughout the book as a symbol of how she has …show more content…

She knows how her life is going wrong. And she has started to try and make it better, by skipping school, having a fake friend, and ignoring what happened to her. When her tree project is brought up in history class Melinda says “I try to draw a branch coming out of a tree trunk for the 315th time. It looks so flat, a cheap, cruddy drawing. I have no idea how to make it come alive” (Anderson 55). Melinda is starting to feel emotions, she is no longer completely dead, but she feels awful about herself. She talks badly about most of her life. Just as the tree is “cheap” and “cruddy” she also feels like she is not worth anything to anyone. Melinda is beginning to branch off into different things, just so she can look alive to others. But like her tree she has no idea how to feel like she is living, not just surviving. The tree is changing as she is because the tree is a perception of her emotions, and who she is doing throughout the

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