Freewill Analysis

Most of Will's story takes place in and around a high school program for troubled kids, which the locals call "Hopeless High" (520). (Stay classy, locals.) Special Programs is intended to be "occup...

Will narrates his experience, but instead of speaking to us—which would give us a first-person narrator—he speaks to himself in a kind of inner dialogue. This book is all you, you, you, which m...

Freewill is about a seventeen-year-old boy struggling with depression and grief about the death of his parents. It has heavy themes—death, suicide, mental health, to name a few—and they are fil...

Okay: Our main character's parents died in what seems like a murder-suicide, and now he attends a school he can't stand while living with his grandparents and generally feeling woe is me about the...

Welcome to Will's head, Shmoopers, a place filled with angst, uncertainty, depression, and other creepy crawlers. You might want to bring a flashlight because it gets pretty freaking dark in here,...

The title—Freewill—is a shout-out to the ending of the book. Well, really it's a shout-out to the whole thing, because Will is making choices the whole time. But it isn't until the end that Wil...

Freewill ends on a surprisingly happy note. After a dark slog through Will's super depressed brain, he goes for a swim after showing the dude in the black jacket who's boss, and emerges reborn. (Ha...

Will—the narrator of Freewill—is not in a good place. And since our experience of this book is filtered through his thoughts, this book can be a pretty tough read at times. More than that, thou...

Orphaned Alienated Gnome-Making Boy Meets Kind and Fearless Misanthropic GirlWill is depressed, still a bit shell-shocked by the death of his parents, and he believes that he is weak and doomed. He...

Sometimes books do some of the dirty work for us, and Freewill is one such book. The three acts here neatly correspond to—you guessed it—the three sections of the book. FaithWill is depressed,...

Lynch got the idea for Freewill when he read about one of the kids at Columbine High School who was leaving memorial objects for his classmates who died.(Source.)In 2002, Freewill won an Honor for...

Nothing steamy in this book, except for the shower Will finally takes after sinking deep into depression for three days. It's a long one, so we're guessing the mirrors in the bathroom get totally f...

Book of Proverbs (580, 581, 586, 629)—specific reference is to idle hands"Sacred Emily" by Gertrude Stein (556)—"A gnome is a gnome is a gnome" references Stein's line, "Rose is a rose is a ros...