Chelsea is a Tragic
Hero
When reading the book Speechless, your first thoughts of the
main character is that she has to be the antagonist. After all, within pages of
starting the book she reveals the secret of a boy she knows, to her whole
school for purely selfish motives. She tells everyone that he’s gay and the
result of this news, a couple of boys from the basketball team go and beat him
up.
I was quick to put her in the villain category because
surely there’d be no way for her to recover from this. After hearing that the boy ended up in the
hospital, Chelsea is quick to realize what she’s done. She tells her parents
and informs the police what happened and who hurt the boy.
Chelsea decides to take an vow of silence, hoping that it’ll
teach her to think before she speaks. The vow causes Chelsea to meet some new
friends and through a crazy turn of events be able to right all the wrongs she made. She even goes as far to apologize to the boy
she outted and to give up the life of lies she once led.
Chelsea fits the description of a tragic hero because she
made an error. A huge one. One that almost cost a boy his life. And with all of
her old friends against her and some new ones to help her, she realizes her
mistakes and tries to make up for them. By the end of the book, she was friends
with the boy she hurt and even his boyfriend.
Speechless really taught me that the words you say can have
a huge impact on another person’s life. A small blurb of gossip here or a
not-so-teasing comment there, can hurt someone. I took a lot more away from
this book than I had originally suspected and was happy to have this as my book
number 3.
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