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Speak By Laurie Halse Anderson: Character Analysis

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In Laurie Halse Anderson’s novel Speak, the main character Melinda is starting her first year of high school in Syracuse, NY. The hardships that follow from the party over the summer are leading Melinda to being depressed, which has made not only made her grades unacceptable, but has resulted in Melinda losing her friends. In the beginning of Melinda’s high school career she was not talking to anyone. She has no friends after ruining the party, she wants to explain what had happened but can not even talk to them. She wants her friends back but she will not explain to them what happened. Melinda finds a new girl in school and becomes friends with her, but not for long. “Look, you can’t eat lunch with me anymore” (Anderson 107). Heather has …show more content…

It made Melinda realize that being quiet, blowing off school and being antisocial is affecting her life in a big way. It is affecting her by making her lose her only friend, and feeling more isolated from everyone than she already is. Along with the troubles at school, Melinda is starting to feel very depressed, she goes home and takes action. One night she took a paper clip and cut her wrist. She is starting to inflict self harm. She wants help from a friend or family member, but they just are not there to help her. “I open a paper clip and scratch it across the inside of my left wrist” (Anderson 87). She wants the attention. She wants the help and tell someone about everything that is going on. The depression started to make her inflict self harm. She decides to cut her left wrist with a paperclip and starts to think about suicide. Her mom notices the cuts and does not bother to care and blows it off as if she does not care to notice what is going on. This adds to the feelings Melinda is having. Her family will not listen and notice what is going on. She feels alone in school and now at home with no one to talk to. The impact the depression had on Melinda affected her a lot. She had lost all of her friends because of the party over the

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On a seemingly emotional high after attending a high school party as a rising freshman, Melinda’s world got turned upside down when she was taken advantage of by a popular senior jock. Along with the pain of the trauma itself, Melinda was reminded of her terrible ordeal each time she came in contact with Andy: “I want to throw up and I can smell him and I run and he remembers and he knows. He whispers in my ear” (Anderson 86). When Andy encroached on her sanctuary in the art room and destroyed her work, Melinda shut down and locked herself in her closet, where she “stuffed [her] mouth with old fabric and screamed until there were no sounds left under [her] skin” (Anderson 162). While interactions with others could incite her anxiety and feelings of depression, continued encounters with her rapist further aggravated Melinda.

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Toward the beginning of the novel, Melinda appears to have no real friends at her side. However, she slowly begins to open up to people such as her art teacher Mr. Freeman and her old friend Ivy, showing the power

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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).

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The new Melinda sees that she needs to say something and she works up the courage to help her once-friend. This really shows Melinda development as a person. She is overcoming her pain and

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But a little whisper of ‘Melinda’ would be nice……. I can see it in my head: a strong old oak tree with a wide scarred trunk and thousands of leaves reaching to the sun…. but when I try to carve it , it looks like a dead tree. ”(33,78) These quotes connote to how Melinda has no sense of who she is or what she wants to be.

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Melinda was raped as a young girl heading into her first year of high school and what happened after that was a catastrophe and would change her life and her peers view of her. Melinda perpetually haunted by her treacherous past memories struggled to stay happy and sane throughout her overwhelming first year of high school. Melinda evolves over time as she longs to be her past happy self again she slowly but surely begins to regain her happiness and self-confidence. With life-changing events coming at Melinda every which way, she experiences the highs and the lows and finds little things in life like her extraordinary passion for art to help her get through the toughest times in her life. This story will make your heart melt with sorrow and compassion, but also bring to you a remarkable story with realistic like events and settings.

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After Melinda admits to herself that she was raped, Melinda starts to realize that

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Speak Journal Response This journal is in response to the novel Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. As a coming-of-age contemporary novel, Speak discusses many sensitive issues that are still prominent even today. In this story, we explore the life of Melinda Sordino, a fourteen-year-old girl who is beginning high school right after experiencing an utterly traumatic event: rape. Melinda is left friendless, with no one to help and support her after what happened.

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Laurie Anderson’s novel, Speak, is about a teenaged girl named Melinda, who is in school and has to overcome her fear to speak about a terrible secret. The convincing setting and the compelling theme makes it easy for students to relate to the story; it takes place in a typical high school and the author reveals the hardships of being young and also being depressed. The characters are very stereotypical people in terms of school as there is the lonely girl, the popular girl, the nice girl, and then the bully, or in this case, the rapist. All three of these contribute to Melindas sorrow or happiness. As noted above, the various characters in the novel reflect typical teen personalities; school figures.

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Speak Have you ever gone through a trauma? “ Recovery doesn't erase the trauma as if it had never happened, it just makes it easier to deal with” ( American Academy of Experts in Traumatic Stress). The novel Speak is about a teenage girl going through her tough high school years. She started the school year with no friends and with a heavy secret weighing over her. One might think that her problems are just teenage normal ones, but what they don't know is that she was suffering from a sexual assault, rape.

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Melinda, in a lot of ways, starts out like that it the book. She becomes a shell of herself from before the party happened and because no one else was there, she is lonely and doesn't have anybody to go to and to make matters even worse, she’s covered by the reputation that she has formed. In the book, Laurie Halse Anderson uses symbolism to convey exactly what Melinda can't say. In the beginning of the book, Melinda starts high school carrying her emotional wounds with her after something happens mysterious to her at a party during the summer.

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