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In High School we were usually told to "Make like a tree…" Melinda here has to make, like, a tree. Art stuff. We're painting with a broad-brush t...
Speak Part 12: Major Themes 101 Views
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Transcript
- 00:00
Thank you We sneak in Speak major themes I'll ashman
- 00:12
What are some of the major themes of this novel
- 00:15
Language and communication are obviously huge themes the novel is
- 00:20
called speak Melinda spends most of the novel not speaking
- 00:24
out about what she's doing but finding other ways to
Full Transcript
- 00:27
write or communicate her last name's sardine oh seems to
- 00:31
be maybe a play on the spanish words sword iowa
- 00:34
or sorta which means deaf unable to here So it's
- 00:38
very clear that melinda can't always communicate and likewise the
- 00:44
other people in her life can't always communicate with her
- 00:47
Isolation is a really huge part of that So the
- 00:51
ordinary kind of teenage isolation that comes with being in
- 00:55
school and dealing with cliques and friends who might like
- 00:58
you're might not like you What melinda is experiencing is
- 01:02
also a kind of experiential isolation on and when i
- 01:08
say that i just mean that she thinks that she
- 01:11
has experienced something that maybe no one else has ever
- 01:14
experienced and that makes her feel totally allowed So it's
- 01:18
really important later in the novel toe understand that multiple
- 01:22
people have experienced this violence This is this is a
- 01:29
novel all about different types of violence actually so we
- 01:32
know all about the physical violence when andy rapes melinda
- 01:36
that's really extreme physical violence but there's also a lot
- 01:40
of psychological violence when andy continues to taunt her but
- 01:46
also when the other kids at her school are just
- 01:50
awful to her those are all things that hurt her
- 01:54
We can see that because she gets more and more
- 01:57
unhappy more and more depressed it ruins her relationships with
- 02:00
her parents or it threatens to do that It makes
- 02:04
her life tangibly worse so these are all ways of
- 02:07
hurting another person whether or not you could physically hurt
- 02:13
So we have sadness and guilt and blame and grief
- 02:17
and those air some of the big ideas that are
- 02:20
always hanging around this novel Yeah what are some of 00:02:28.355 --> [endTime] the major themes of this novel Say what
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