Speak By Laurie Halse Anderson Character Analysis

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson is a coming of age themed fictional Novel based around Melinda Sordino, a freshman at Merryweather High School. During her days at school Melinda found trouble fitting in and speaking because of an incident that happened at a summer party. That incident being that she was raped by a senior named Andy Evans, aka, “IT.” At the time, Melinda panicked and ended up calling the police, which resulted in everyone despising her. Similarly to “high school drama,” the author illustrated gossip and the effects it can have on a person. To compare, when the news hit Melinda, she became silent and isolated staying away from any old friends she glanced upon. Fortunately, Melinda found new hope when a stranger asked, “I’m Heather

During the school year it is clear that the other students have bullied Lysandra. “..as she passed by, the other kids would whisper ,”Pigeon-Toed Cochrane!”” (127). As Lysandra is being teased, not once do we see Elaine try to take initiative and try to stand up for her best friend. Elaine merely stood by as the other students ridiculed her, if she were truly Lysandra’s best friend the least she could do is defend Lysandra in some way.

Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson, is a story written in the first person about a young girl named Melinda Sordino. The title of the book, Speak, is ironically based on the fact that Melinda chooses not to speak. The book is written in the form of a monologue in the mind of Melinda, a teenage introvert. This story depicts the story of a very miserable freshman year of high school. Although there are several people in her high school, Melinda secludes herself from them all. There are several people in her school that used to be her friend in middle school, but not anymore. Not after what she did over the summer. What she did was call the cops on an end of summer party on of her friends was throwing. Although

When students are bullied, they are encouraged to speak up about it to a teacher or some other adult; however, many do not, because they may think their cases are not important enough to be told, because no one will believe their stories, or because they are embarrassed by what happened. As these cases turn from simple bullying to a more severe event, this inability to speak up only increases. Laurie Halse Anderson shows this effect with being raped, as well as the emotional damage that goes with it. Through Melinda’s experiences in Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson’s writing reflects the time in which it was written, her views on teens and the adolescent years, and her early life.

Laurie Halse Anderosn has written a book which is considered as a trauma novel “speak”. Usually anger is a phase that begins with madness and ends with regret, but in this book anger will be tackled in different way, Melinda’s anger starts with silence and ends with speaking. In other words it’s starts with fear and ends with triumph over self. Over the course of the novel silence struggling with anger is leading to speak. Anderson incorporated all themes in anger direction with different techniques such as flashback, allusion, symbolism, and fragmentation.

In “Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson,the main character is Melinda Sordino… The author wants Melinda to speak to her friends,family, and teachers. Thorough the book,Melinda has problems with her family. For example Her parents are always working.They don't check on Melinda when she gets home.

Anne is treated harshly by those around her. . "Harsh words and shouts are constantly being flung at my head, though I'm absolutely not used to it. According

“It is my first morning of high school. I have seven new notebooks, a skirt I hate, and a stomachache,” (Anderson 3). These are Melinda Sordino's first thoughts as she enters her first year of high school. Melinda dreads having to be around so many people and is shunned by other students for calling the police at a summer party. She falls into depression and decides to stay silent about what happened. As the school year goes on, Melinda knows that she will have to face her biggest fear: to speak. Laurie Halse Anderson, author of Speak, uses numerous archetypes and allusions to put a powerful impact on readers. These archetypes and allusions make Melinda’s struggles relatable to real life problems and situations and reflect universal

Finally, Melinda undoes the stitches which sealed her lips for so long and learns to express herself and her feelings with the guidance and friendship. In sum, Laure Halse Anderson’s Speak uses various conflicts to prove the necessity of friendship and support to grow past trauma. Over the course of her grade

Melinda Sordino, the fourteen-year-old star of Speak, loses the capacity to convey after she is sexually struck at a gathering. Rather than standing up about the end result for her, she restrains her agony inside, trusting that on the off chance that she doesn't talk about it, she'll overlook the end result for her. Laurie Halse Anderson's intense novel takes after Melinda as she re-figures out how to talk. She discovers heaps of different astute methods of correspondence meanwhile. A portion of these are powerful, such as directing her feelings into workmanship and science. Others, such as sending trouble signs to the outside world by scratching her wrists, don't convey what she needs them to. She discovers that quiet has a place and a reason, yet that occasionally noisily, dangerous as it can be important. She changed her physical appearance and lost friends. She had bad lips and a weird body. She was

I was livid as both the audience, and as young woman who could picture herself in place of the protagonist. Considering the prevelance of how often this actually occurs among young girls today, this heavily influenced how I went about the rest of the book. Unfortunately, this unthinkable event was not going to be the last during Fanelli’s first year at

I was having flashbacks to my geometry teacher.” Although Sadie is praised for her rebellion and rebellion is accepted in their group of friends, Sadie hadn’t expected that rebellion benefits forming friendships at Latham. “I’d expected to hate Latham, but I hadn’t expected to find friends who hated the exact same things about it, mocking the rules and the teachers and Dr. Barons until we were laughing so hard we could barely breathe.” Latham helped Sadie and her friends feel as if they were normal teenagers, rather than teenagers with an

Throughout the poem, Pages Matam explores the key ideas and issues of victim-blaming and silencing victims due to society’s taboo of speaking out about sexual assault along with the foundations of rape culture. Matam effectively outlines the harmful idea that, your beauty leads to sexual assault which society inflicts upon victims, as a constant motif throughout the poem in the lines “Tell Elizabeth Fritzl, how pretty the flame of her skin was”, using sophisticated imagery within an allusion to explore this idea, comparing the providing an evidence-base to further support his argument and perspective. This idea is further reinforced in the repetition used in “Tell my 11th grade student, Lauren, that she wanted it, her beauty had them coming’

Asking a child which snack he prefers, a vegetable or something better suited for dessert, it is more than likely he will choose the tooth-rotting goodness of his favorite treat, even if it is against his parents’ demands. It is quite extraordinary how a child, although in a situation less life-changing than an adult may be in, can also make the choice to do something ruthless because it is too irresistible to pass up. Due to this atavistic tendency, the message of making the right choices is ubiquitous in media. In Michael Lehmann’s drama Heathers, Veronica Sawyer finds difficulty in assuaging her situation because of her oscillation between choosing to carry out all opportunities to take revenge or to stick to ethics, leading into the idea

Along the novel, the narrator reveals moments where honor must be maintained. Marquez mentions that Pura Vicario and her husband “accompanied [Angela] to watch over her honor” when “it was less than two months before her marriage. Connotatively, Angela’s “honor” had to be protected before her marriage communicating that her “honor” was actually her virginity rather to Beyardo, his honor involves that virginity of the women in his family. Violence due to the loss of Angela’s virginity is evident when Beyardo returns her and her “mother beats her up for disgracing her family”. Imagery incorporated describes how infuriated her mother really was because of the consequences to come involving the critics in town. Moreover, the loss of Angela’s virginity is what ultimately leads her twin brother to seek revenge in order to restore her honor. The narrator clarifies this by revealing that the twins were “comforted by the honor of having done their duty”. This helps clarify that the twins were relieved and viewed the action as a “duty” rather than a murder, depicting the importance of killing