Laurie Halse Anderson Characters

The novel Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson is a very good book. The characters are very well developed and change throughout the course of the book, including learning an extremely important moral with which many people agree. There are many dynamic characters, including Melinda, Heather, Rachel, Melinda’s parents, and Andy. By the end of the book, Melinda learns an important lesson about being able to speak up for yourself. Between this important moral, well-developed characters, and many other factors, Speak is an amazing novel. Multiple characters change throughout the course of the book. The most important of the dynamic characters is Melinda, seeing as she is the protagonist. In the beginning of the book, Melinda goes to school terrified
of the results of calling the cops at a senior’s party. In the following months, fear becomes acceptance. She begins to accept the fact that everybody in school loathes her, and that there is no possible way to return her life to normalcy. However, within the last part of the novel, Melinda starts to regain confidence and eventually is able to fight Andy. One of the biggest things that helps her regain confidence is when everybody writes negative remarks about Andy on the bathroom wall. Heather also changes as a person, but her change effects Melinda in a negative way. When Heather first meets Melinda, she is a very hyper person who wants to be involved in every school activity, regardless of not being in any cliques. However, throughout the novel, her plans change as her only goal becomes to join the Marthas’ clique. She dedicates all of spare time single-handedly organizing activities that all of the Marthas are supposed to help with. Eventually, Heather even has to ask Melinda for help organizing a school event, and is crushed when Melinda denies her help. Rachel goes through a more subtle change, but she still changes. When the novel begins, Rachel isn’t discussed very often, aside from brief discussions with Melinda. However, it is very clear that she hates Melinda, and has no chance of possibly feeling any sympathy for her ever again. However, at the end of the book at the library, Melinda and Rachel have a friendly conversation, until Melinda tells her that Andy raped her. By the end of the book, when the secret is revealed to everybody, Rachel feels terrible and calls Melinda on the phone immediately, and Melinda even considers responding to Rachel’s voicemail. Melinda’s parents also go through a change in their attitude toward Melinda’s problem. Since they don’t know about what happened at the party, they just assume that Melinda is playing a childish game by not speaking to them. As her problem worsens, however, her parents start to take it more seriously. Although they don’t try to get her psychiatric help or a psychologist, they do begin to respect her wishes to be silent, which can be viewed as an improvement of their views. When Melinda finally speaks to her mother, her mother is shocked. However, she is also excited that whatever’s been happening might be drawing to a close, whereas in the beginning this would have been an end to her childish game. Andy also goes through a change, despite being cocky throughout the book, he changes the ways in which he acts cocky. In the beginning, Andy threatens Melinda, whispers to her, and does everything in his power to make her terrified of him. Later, Andy’s cockiness becomes about his relationship with Rachel. He does not see any problem with touching Rachel exactly the same way he touched Melinda, despite seeing what it did to Melinda. Due to his cockiness, Rachel then breaks up with Andy, which ultimately leads to the fight between him and Melinda. Speak has a very important message that more people in society need to understand, especially with the recent increase in cyberbullying. The moral of the novel is that you have to be able to speak up for yourself and defend yourself. In the beginning of the book, Melinda is unwilling to tell anybody the reason for her calling the cops at the party, despite the fact that it would clearly justify her actions. Instead, she simply keeps it a secret and begins to spiral downward. She cuts a lot of classes and spends time in her redecorated janitor’s closet, as well as losing the one friend she’s had as a freshman, Heather, to the Marthas. To make matters worse, Rachel calls her a jealous liar upon discovering that her former best friend’s rapist was taking her to senior prom. However, Andy begins to touch Rachel in inappropriate ways, and she realizes that Melinda wasn’t lying. After that, however, Melinda writes on the bathroom stall that people should stay away from Andy, and the results were not what she expected. People were writing paragraphs at a time about how creepy he is. An example is, “What’s the name of that drug they give perverts so they can’t get it up? Diprosomething. He should get it every morning in his orange juice. I went out with him to the movies, he tried to get his hands down my pants during the PREVIEWS!!” (Anderson 186). Other comments include, “He’s a creep,” and, “He’s a bastard.” (Anderson 185). This gave Melinda the confidence to fight Andy on the last day of school when he attacks her in the janitor’s closet. After these events, everybody is able to empathize with Melinda, and suddenly she becomes the most popular girl in school for the day. Melinda realizes that if she hadn’t had the courage to stand up for herself, Andy would have raped her again in the janitor’s closet. This novel is amazing.
The characters are developed so well. Psychological thrillers, such as Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, can be hard to write, because the reader almost always has to know what the characters are thinking, and this has to be done while developing a plot. There was nothing in particular that I didn’t enjoy about the book. The final confrontation with Andy was climactic, despite my expectations of an anticlimactic ending like what usually occurs in books read for school. Anderson even developed Andy well enough that when Melinda was holding a piece of glass to his neck, I didn’t want her to kill him, despite his having raped her. In the aftermath of this confrontation, Melinda’s goal is to finish her tree before the school year ends. One girl sees her and congratulates her on defeating Andy. Melinda finishes the tree, and recognizes the fact that it is perfect because of its imperfections. This is an amazingly written ending, and a great conclusion to a great novel. Most loose ends are tied up, and the ones that aren’t resolved, such as Rachel calling Melinda after the fight, were supposed to be left for interpretation. The ending was satisfying, and not simply because it had a happy ending. The ending satisfies because it was realistic. Anderson could have simply written that Rachel believed Melinda when she was initially told that Andy raped Melinda, and then everything ends happily ever after. Instead, Rachel is infuriated, the same way a real teenager would, and is in denial, which is a natural human response to negative emotions. The fight is also realistic, because Melinda legitimately defeats Andy on her own without any form of dumb luck. This was an amazingly written
novel. The novel Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson is a brilliantly written novel with an extremely important moral that many people in today’s society need to learn for themselves. Each character, protagonist and antagonist, change throughout the book. The moral that being able to speak up for yourself is important taught in such an intriguing and fascinating way that captivates its readers. The story was written so well. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson is definitely one of the better books we’ve read this year in English class.