Character Analysis: Speak By Laurie Halse Anderson

Speak Essay In the book Speak written by Laurie Halse Anderson, Psychological forces such as depression, anxiety, trauma and fear can control people's emotions and actions, rather than themselves controlling their emotions and actions. In the book Speak, Melinda faces a major trauma causing her emotions to control her life instead of her controlling her own life such as depression controls her emotions, fear controls her actions and anxiety controls her social life. The book speak is about a young girl who went to a party got drunk and was raped by a guy. She never told anyone about what happened and bottled her emotions pushing her into a depression. She was forced to face high school where the guy who raped her went to school, he dated her ex-friends and was always around her somehow. Melinda lost a lot of peers after she called the cops on the party and she also lost “friends” for being depressed as her “friend’ heather told her “...You are the most depressed person I’ve ever met…(105 Anderson)” The setting of the story is at Merryweather high in New york. This story's narrator is Melinda as this was written in the first person. The Protagonist in the story is Melinda, she is a different kind of person now than when she used to be. In her youth, she was a free
spirit and blithe but now she isn't a free spirit depression controls her and she has become a different person. Melinda's speech is calm yet wary. She seems to know what she is gonna say before she says it, yet she never speaks her mind or says what is truly wrong as she is a very furtive person after the party. Melinda wears clothes that are out of date that she buys from the store her mother is the manager of. The girls at school make fun of her for wearing the clothes she wears instead of the new fashionable clothes they wear. She says she is “..an ordinary drone dressed in secrets and lies..(70 Anderson)” Melinda is a kind and caring person,yet she is very furtive. She cleans up nail polish from her “friend” heather's new carpet after heather fortuitously knocked it over. Melinda also draws beautiful art of trees that starts out dead but eventually gets better. Melinda thinks to herself a lot about how she is a loser and how she “...was a huge disappointment. I'm not pretty or smart or athletic…(70 Anderson)”, she is at a fork in the road with other telling someone the beast Andy Evans raped her and she thinks about how much she hates her trees that she draws. Melinda's personality and backstory give this story its depth by showing just how much a trauma can affect your life and change you as a person and make you go from normally being happy to being sad and down. The main conflict of this story is her being raped and having to go to high school where she is hated by everyone because they think she called the cops on the party for no reasons they as didn't know she had been raped. Andy Evans Is the main symbol of conflict along with her tree. The tree is a project she started around the first week of high school in art. She has to draw a tree that shows character and emotion through the power of art and she has to do that with a tree. In the beginning, the tree is dead and lifeless in her drawing just as she is inside as she has lost all her friend and she hasn't told anyone what happened to her so she bottled it up inside which eventually killed her inside. And later on, the tree becomes full of life and full of emotion after she told someone what happened and the lacrosse team found Andy and her in a janitor closet together with her fighting him off. In this story the discrete and main symbols such as the tree made the story show just how much emotions can affect your life, it shows that if you are dead inside it will show its self to others and if you are alive in life it will also show to others.Also, Andy Evans added detail to the story by being the one who caused a major trauma in Melinda's life and this story just shows how much a trauma can affect your life forever, it can mess you up mentally, physically and emotionally.
Melinda, in the end, tells someone and I would think she got justice, but that night scared her for life, she wasn't able to function for so long since she was trapping her emotions inside
herself.