Depression is something that everyone has felt. However severe or minor, that feeling of hopelessness and uselessness is a never-ending void that will continuously pull someone in until there is nothing left. Such is the feeling that Melinda Sordino suffers in the novel Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. Her depression stems from being raped at a party before freshman year and becomes a social outcast because no one knows what happened. During her first year at high school, she slowly learns how to express herself through her art, symbolized by a tree. Laurie Halse Anderson uses the tree as a motif to trace Melinda’s growth from someone who is afraid and depressed to someone who is strong and more stable.
In the beginning of the story, we can tell that Melinda is very depressed despite her internal sense of humor. Since the party that she called
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She skips and is acting even more out of the ordinary compared to what her parents expect her to do. Her life is spiraling, and she doesn’t know how to stop. When in art class again, Melinda feels that “My tree is frozen” (Anderson, 103). In this stage of the story, Melinda feels stuck. She is not getting anywhere and struggles to open up to anyone, even her “friend” Heather. So, she acts out, by skipping school, cutting classes, and not attempting in her classes, and even cutting herself. It is all a plea for help, trying to feel something else than the fear that came with thinking about what happened. However, Melinda finds some salvation in her art. When experimenting with drawing cubism in art, she “[sketches] a cubist tree with hundreds of skinny rectangles for branches” (Anderson, 119). She can now see that her life is spiraling out of her control, branching out into directions she does not like, taking shapes that she does not recognize. But she is frozen still and cannot even reach out for