The Hate U Give Character Analysis

“Brave doesn’t mean you’re not scared. It means you go on even though you’re scared.” (Thomas 331). In Angie Thomas’s book, The Hate U Give, the main character Starr is greatly affected when her friend Khalil dies. In the beginning of the book, Starr, a 16 year old high-school student, goes to a party with her friends in Garden Heights which is the neighborhood she grew up in. One of those friends is a 16 year old boy, Khalil. Starr and Khalil leave the party in a car where a white cop pulls them over. This interaction with Khalil and the cop ends with Khalil dead on the street from the cop’s bullet. Starr witnessed this, and is reminded of another one of her childhood friends, Natasha, who was accidentally shot and killed by a stray bullet

One thing that is repeated again and again is Starr saying it’s her fault. This shows she has survivor’s guilt and she feels partly responsible for her friend Khalil’s death and for being scared/not speaking up on it. For example, “All of this is my fault. The riots, gunshots, tear gas, all of it, are ultimately my fault” (Thomas 140). At this point in the book, there is a lot of violence because of Khalil’s death. Starr saw this as her fault because she made a statement to the police and felt that she forgot key details to show that Khalil was not a bad person. She also felt guilty for Khalil’s death and for the fact that if she did something different or said something different she could be dead too. This is survivor’s guilt, which is what happens when people make it out of a bad situation alive when someone else did not. She feels guilty that she made it but Khalil didn’t, and she asks herself questions about why she survived. The grief she was experiencing even played a part in her losing relationships to people close to her, and it caused her to have nightmares about her friends both dying. This shows how grief can negatively affect someone, and how it can really impact someone’s