After she got all moved into her dorm room, her parents left to go sleep in their hotel room. She met her roommate Laura, but Laura didn’t make a great first impression when she called her parents deaf and dumb and also that Laura decided to sleep naked. Later that night, she traveled to her parents’ hotel room hoping
Speak, the story of Melinda Sordino, the girl without a voice. In speak the main protagonist, Melinda, has to go through high school with almost everyone in her school hating her because of a misunderstanding, she called the police on a summer party because she was sexually assaulted but never had the courage to say anything. Throughout the book the writer, Laurie Anderson uses trees to symbolize changes in Melinda’s life like (insert thing here), how Melinda needs to remove the “dead branches” from her life so she can move on and grow from her experiences, and how Melinda was finally able to “cut the dead branches” from her life and learn to speak up for herself. A good example of Melinda’s transformation is shown in this next quote. “He’s
I recently read the book Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. The main character Melinda Sordino went through a lot during her summer. Her freshman year isn't off to a good start. During the summer she called the cops at a party, no one knew why she kept it a secret, but she soon tells of what really happened. She changed a lot throughout the story from being depressed, staying home and hiding in a closet at school, to becoming open and telling her secret of what happened to her.
Everybody in the school is angry at Melinda, taunting her, for calling the cops at a party thrown over the summer. She stands in silence, not even her ex-best friends Ivy and Rachel will talk to her. Little does anyone know, Melinda was raped at that party by Andy Evans, a popular senior at her school because she was too drunk to
Melinda is an outstanding example of a sexual assault victim afraid to speak up. Melinda passes out from
It isn’t perfect and that makes it just right.” As seen in the text, Melinda finally realizes that she can/has grown. Its not her fault she was raped, it doesn't define her, but it can help shape her. She states that she isn't perfect, similar to her homely sketch, but that's OK; nobody is perfect. Melinda also learns how to reassure herself and how to cope with her trauma, saying “It wasn’t my fault.
This shows that Melinda was so traumatized by what she experienced it caused her to become silent. Along with that because everyone around gave off the impression that she was disliked, Melinda felt she had no one she felt safe enough around to explain what happened that night. As the school year went on, Melinda
Melinda avoids talking about her assault as she is struggling with feelings of guilt, shame and fear, fear of being judged or not believed if she tells someone about what happened to her. Melinda is haunted by the memory of her rape which contributes to her decision to keep her assault a secret. Therefore,with Melindas
At the end of the story she finally found her voice and was able to stand up for herself. In the beginning, Melinda didn't talk to anyone, barely even to her parents. She says, “I have tried so hard to forget every second of that stupid party and here I am in the middle of a hostile crowd that hates me for what I had to do. I can't tell them what really happened” (Anderson, 28).
Drunk, dazed and violated she called the police on the huge party she was at. She soon developed a case of post traumatic stress disorder. Melinda became closed off and stopped talking. She never told anyone about her rape. All of her old friends rejected her after the call to the police.
She kept her secret so long that she now views it as a second nature to be quiet. Resentment and hate are two very strong words usually not used to describe friends. Her relationship with Heather turns sour when Heather decides that the depressed girl with a bad reputation cannot be her friend. Melinda cannot even start over with new friends. Without coming clean and freeing her “reputation” she is unable to change.
She didn’t have anyone to vent to or make her feel more important. She had to suffer through her life taunting experience alone. With no friends to help her through this tough time she felt it hard to persevere and thus found herself slip into depression. Little did Melinda know that all she had to do was fight through and eventually when she moved onto sophomore year she will finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. Melinda is not the only one who went through hardships, so did Reavun in The Chosen.
After Melinda admits to herself that she was raped, Melinda starts to realize that
Unfortunately, one out of every six women have been through an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime. But, their problems don’t end when the deed has been done, seventy percent of women experience moderate to severe distress following the incident and thirty-three percent contemplate suicide. Rape is a serious problem in our society today but, the process of recovering from such a vile traumatic experience can be arduous. The novel “Speak” by Laurie Halse Anderson perfectly illustrates a young girl’s struggle to recover from the devastating experience that is rape. In Anderson’s novel, we enter the mind of a 14-year-old girl named Melinda.
Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Conscientious Objector” convinces readers that the speaker’s cause is just and heroic by using references to great evils in history to increase the impact of her words on the audience. The poem constantly depicts the speaker’s acceptance of “Death” as an alternative to revealing information that would give away the security of another’s life. In the first stanza, Millay uses the imagery of Death riding a horse to show how her speaker refuses to assist Death in reaching its victims in places such as Cuba and the Balkans as mentioned in lines five and six, which at the time where places where corruption and death ran rampant. The speaker demonstrates their refusal to aid Death in this stanza by rejecting to help “him” mount his horse and leave to wreak his havoc on others. Stanza two switches to a different time period, Antebellum America, with Death pictured as a man hunting down a runaway slave, torturing the speaker in an attempt to extract information regarding the slave’s whereabouts.
