The Importance Of Outcast's Forest In Speak

An Outcast’s Forest

Everett Mamor once said, “We can learn a lot from trees: they're always grounded, but never stop reaching heavenward”(Mamor). In literature, trees can show many things, such as growth, change, and life. In the novel Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, trees are used to represent the main character Melinda and her struggles. Melinda is an outcast at school, shunned by her peers for calling the police on a party where she was raped. She is almost invisible at home, where her family communicates through sticky notes and avoids interacting with each other. She sinks into deep depression, her only outlet being the trees she is creating in art class. Melinda is similar to the trees she creates because many of her experiences parallel a tree’s struggles to grow and survive.

She realizes that she will never be the same person she was before. “I can see it in my head: a strong old oak tree with a wide scarred trunk and thousands of leaves reaching towards the sun...But when I try to carve it, it looks like a dead tree, toothpicks, a child’s drawing” (Anderson 78). Melinda can’t bring life to her trees because she can’t find life within herself: she has become little more than a robot, going through her days methodically, feeling as little emotion as possible. The trees she is sculpting shows how she feels inside: like she has lost who she really is. “My last tree looked like it had died from some fungal infection- not the effect I wanted at all”(Anderson 92). Melinda wants to be the outgoing, happy person she used to be, but she is unable to escape from the memories and experiences that are slowly killing her. She feels powerless to save