Speak Essay

Reflective Personality The novel Speak is about a girl named Melinda. She is very shy and timid throughout the story but that is only because she had gotten raped at a party over the summer. She called the cops because of what had happened so for calling the cops everyone hated her and wouldn’t talk to her, even her best friends. A main part or motif of the story is mirrors. Every time Melinda looks in a mirror or a reflective object it reflects on how she is feeling about herself that part of the story. The images of herself that she sees progress through the story along with Melinda’s attitude. In the beginning of the story Melinda is just going into high school as a freshman. The boy who raped her over the summer, Andy Evans, who is a senior, goes to her school and Melinda sees him a lot so she gets reminded that he raped her every time she sees him. The first time Melinda looks in a mirror in the story she comes home from school and lays down on the couch and looks in the mirror and sighs because she thinks she looks disgusting because of her straggly hair and bitten lips. The way she looks in the image of the mirror explains her attitude, she is disgusted with herself because she got raped and thinks it is her fault because she does not understand the concept of what happened quite yet. Melinda hates school because everyone picks on her behind her back and they do not talk to her. She finds a janitor closet to be her hideout from everyone. In her “hideout” there is a mirror and it its cracked with cobwebs all over it and Melinda says about it “ looks like no one has hung out here in a while” she is referring to herself as the mirror. The relationship between the two is that Melinda’s personality is cracked and old and no one has hung out with her in a long time either. Before the party where Melinda got raped she did have friends, Rachel and Nicole. The last Halloween they all came home from trick-or-treating and they did a superstitious game of seeing