Speaker for the Dead
As Orson Scott Card, author of Speaker for the Dead, wrote this book, the theme thereof was altered by his intentions for writing the book. These intentions were to demonstrate the idea of Speakers of the dead, to illustrate the effects they can have on people, and to exemplify the understanding of an alien race.
In Speaker for the Dead, Speakers for the dead, or Speakers, are people who retell the lives of the deceased. They tell of the lives of the dead as they were, as opposed to the common funeral speech which only tells of the good of that person, not their actual life. Orson Scott Card had the idea of this book due to the fact that he “grew dissatisfied with the way that we use our funerals to revise the life of the dead, to give the dead a story so different from their actual life that, in effect, we kill them all over again” (Card ix). Orson’s primary purpose in writing Speaker for the Dead was always the same: to show how powerful accurately retelling the lives of the dead is.…show more content… Within the novel, several important characters and the community itself never saw the life of a man named Marco as it really was, that is, until a speaker for the dead spoke his death. The people most affected by the speaking were Marco’s family. They, and the rest of society, had seen him as an abusive husband and father. However, as a result of the speaking they saw him for who he really was, a loving and good intentioned man who was put in terribly difficult circumstances which caused him to make poor decisions. This brought peace to his family and changed many lives