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Speak Part 12: Major Themes 101 Views


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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

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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