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Examples Of Character Development In Speak By Laurie Halse Anderson

755 Words4 Pages

In the book Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, Melinda gives a really good example of character development throughout the story. Melinda just starts her freshman year at high school. Over the summer her and her friends went to a party and Melinda gets raped by a boy named Andy Evans and ends up calling the police, she didn't tell anyone why she called the police, causing her friends and everyone at the party to reject her. Melinda’s only friend is a new girl named heather. Melinda gets depressed and starts expressing her pain through stuff like biting her lips and her nails, and not talking. At the end of the story she finally found her voice and was able to stand up for herself.
In the beginning, Melinda didn't talk to anyone, barely even to her parents. She says, “I have tried so hard to forget every second of that stupid party and here I am in the middle of a hostile crowd that hates me for what I had to do. I can't tell them what really happened” (Anderson, 28). Everyone hates her for calling the police at a party during the summer, but nobody knows …show more content…

When she says “My head is killing me, my throat is killing me, my stomach bubbles with toxic waste. I just want to sleep. A coma would be nice, or amnesia. Anything, just to get rid of this, these thoughts, whispers in my mind. Did he rape my mind too?” (Anderson, 165). In this part of the book melinda is watching an episode of oprah and it's an episode about a girl who's been raped and melinda's subconscious wakes up and makes it seem like oprah is talking to her telling her she was raped, she just started to come to realization that she really was raped at the party and she was getting really overwhelmed and started feeling sick. She already knew she got raped, but she was in doubt and she didn't want it to be true which is why it took so long for her to

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