More handpicked essays just for you.
To kill a mockingbird about characters
To kill a mockingbird character development jem
To kill a mockingbird a character study essay
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
At this point in the novel, the only thing revealed about what happened was that she had called the cops on a high school party during summer, leaving her friends mad at her. Melinda went through the first few classes and lunch on her terrible first day, finding them all completely miserable.
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.
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).
She faces powerful adversity as a teenager, which puts her in a hole. She didn’t let that stop her though. This represents how she made the change to want to get better, and developed a self-motivator within
This moment is a huge turning point in Melinda 's life. This marks the moment when she finally speaks up about what happened. This event shows so much about who Melinda was and is becoming. Prior to telling Rachel, Melinda decides to send Rachel a note warning her about Andy. “I groan and rip out a piece of notebook paper.
Here you notice when she is starting to isolate herself and not express what she truly feels to anyone. This later continues in chapter “Closet space” where it states “I want to confess everything, hand over the guilt and mistake and anger to someone else… Even if I dump the memory, it will stay with me, staining me. My closet is a good thing, a quiet place that helps me hold these inside my head where no one can hear them.” Melinda’s is having trouble talking, or communicating with others, lately.
Throughout the novel, this is presented through the symbolism of the janitor’s closet that Melinda claims as her own. Firstly, after stumbling into an old janitor’s closet while trying to get away from a teacher, Melinda chooses to
She is mentally struggling, and they cannot even tell because of how much they are not home. They do not even hear her out or ask why her grades are so low. They just assume that she is being lazy and not doing her work. This is an example of miscommunication because Melinda feels trapped inside her own mind, and her parents are expecting too much from her with the mental state that she is in at this time. In the play as well as the novel, the parents and the teenager do not communicate well with each other, and this causes the teenagers to feel alone, frustrated, and
Symbolism is the practice of representing things by symbols, or of investing things with a symbolic meaning or character. In Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson uses literary devices to help the reader better understand Melinda’s personal changes and growth. Trees, lips, and coldness are all symbolically used to represent the changes of Melinda. Throughout the novel, trees play a big part in symbolizing Melinda. Melinda is constantly drawing and relating to trees in the book.
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.
A space where Melinda can physically be alone is what she needed to even more so build a wall between her and others, thus being why the closet is an important aspect and symbol. Isolation is what helped Melinda cope with her pain, this is what makes it the major theme in the novel. Melinda’s lips are cracked, swollen and scabby. Everyone
The Seasons of Melinda Ever notice when the seasons change, people change? In the novel Speak, author Laurie Halse Anderson explores the idea of change. The book is about a high school freshman named Melinda Sordino, who has been raped and is trying to get over it. Melinda faced lots of challenges, including losing friends, dealing with school, confronting her rapist, and learning how to communicate with her dysfunctional family.
She thought she needed a man to be herself when she really did not and she figured that out. She found her confidence on her own because of who she is just like the woman in “Phenomenal
Her inability to perform as good she does led her to lose her self-confidence and self-esteem further adding on to the symptoms she displays of Major Depression (Burke,
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.
