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Analysis Of Unwind

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Unwind Message
Many people will go through experiences in their lives where they feel like they are changing. It is as if life has dealt them enough experiences that their personalities have been altered because of it. Unwind by Neal Shusterman shows how the past experiences people go through may dictate who they become and the decisions they may make in the future through the lives of Roland, Admiral Dunfee, and Lev.
Throughout the novel, Roland is portrayed as an aggressive young man who has the desire to fight anyone who gets in his way. Yet as the readers soon discover, he is a young man with a very troubled past. Roland’s past shapes who he becomes today in that he is very distrusting of women due to the experiences he has gone through. As Connor finds out in the basement of the antique shop, Roland’s mother essentially abandoned him for her husband. As the novel states, “That’s not what did him in, though. Roland had beaten up his stepfather for beating his mom. The mother took her husband’s side, and the stepfather got off with a warning. Roland, on the other hand, was sent to be unwound” (Schusterman 99). After Roland’s mother abandoned him for his stepfather, he began to fight other individuals in order to gain power. Another example of Roland’s distrust for women comes at the very end of the novel when he is being unwound and he is recalling memories from his past. Roland recalls, “When I was three, I had a babysitter. She was beautiful. She shook my sister. Real hard. My sister got wrong. Never got right again. Beautiful is dangerous. Better get them first” (Schusterman 293). After this experience, Roland is likely to never trust women, or other beautiful people, again. For him to experience both his mother’s abandonment and his sister’s injuries at the hand of the babysitter, Roland chooses not to trust women again, resulting in his poor treatment of Risa, and the other females he comes in contact with.
Admiral Dunfee, similarly, is affected by his past. When the novel first introduces the Admiral, he is portrayed as a cold-hearted dictator in charge of hundreds of Unwinds, but there is a reason the Admiral comes off as distant. When the Unwinds first arrive at The Graveyard, they are expected to

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