Bullying And Suicide In Laurie Halse Anderson's 'Twisted'

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Recommended: How is literature related to reality

Juliana DiMuccio

Greenlee P0

English II-P

May 11, 2016

The Twisted Changes Literature Makes

Fiction books can teach students the issues with bullying and suicide. If fiction gets taken away students won’t learn what makes a bully a bully, why a bully bullies and what bullying can lead to in the long run. The novel Twisted is written beautifully by Laurie Halse Anderson. Anderson tells a story about a couple of people who all experience bullying and the consequences of bullying. Bullying is brought up a lot in this book. Tyler gets beat up, cyberbullying is involved and he gets blamed for it. Many kids are bullied in school and online and it often leads to mental illnesses or suicide. Fiction can teach kids why bullying needs to be talked about more because it’s a big problem. …show more content…

“Victims of bullies suffer the psychological consequences all the way until, middle age, with higher levels of depression, anxiety, and suicide, new research shows,” claimed Karen Kaplan. Her article can relate to a character named Yoda. “Yoda was lying across the bench on his stomach his wrists tied together with duct tape. His jeans and boxers had been yanked down. His butt cheeks had been taped together too,” quoted from page 69 by Anderson. Anderson wrote that part of the book to show that kids can be mean for no reason. Yoda didn’t deserve to be treated like that and the characters said it was “messing around”. Messing around won’t always be taken lightly. Karen Kaplan also stated “The immediate ill effects of bullying have been well documented with experts increasingly seeing it as a form of child abuse.” We don’t want our children to have mental illness. So encouraging kids to read fiction is school can lower these rates of bullying. Kids are our future and we don’t want our future bitter and

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