Isabella Esposito
August 18, 2015
Mr. Shera Period 3
Essay Question #5
The Impossible Knife of Memory
“The Impossible Knife of Memory” by Laurie Halse Anderson is a fiction novel about a new coming senior who moves back to her old town after being on the road with her father, who suffers from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), for five years. This book touches on sensitive issues that occur in a typical teenager’s life along with issues that can occur in many adult’s lives as well. While tackling other subjects besides PTSD, this novel includes issues such as suicidal thoughts and acts, (war) depression, and alcoholism and drug abuse. In the beginning chapters of the book Hayley first uses her description upon the two types…show more content… “Another lesson: everyone is born a freak” Hayley also mentions shortly after telling the readers to run from a lying zombie. By her two types of people in the world, Hayley means and separates freaks as people who have the drive and will to have opinions and options for the future and who are willing to remember the past. She, in a way at this time is hypocritical because at the start of the book, until she comes across Finn and starts to go through her own problems, is actually a zombie. However, Hayley does not ponder upon that thought until Finn in the last thrilling chapter of this novel brings it up. Hayley here is afraid that she might start not-remembering again and get too scared when she is left on her own 74 miles southwest while Finn was 180 miles northeast of where they were. She had been a member of the living dead throughout this novel by believing it was too painful to think about the nice times she had as a kid with her grandma and Trish and her dad. For a period of time, she had no recollection of the past, no future, and was only living minute by…show more content… The way I view it, I would pitch that there are people who sink, and then there are those who swim. Swimmers, not easily can take on what is thrown at them in this ocean of opportunities we as humans, call life. They can manage to make a future for themselves and even generations to come and manage to achieve excellence from what they were given; make the best out of a situation as optimists do. Now, as for the sinkers of the world, I believe this could be measured on a scale, nearly similar to a swimmer per say, just took the wrong path, the complete opposite to the strong willed brave swimmers of the world. Unfortunately, the sinkers of the world are the ones who just cannot stay afloat. Some are just so happening to be drowning in a sea of their own self-pity from time to time and occasionally cannot find a way out alive to become a swimmer. This non-utopian world to me reflects to the same non-utopian world we live in today, with the issues that can fit right into these groups easily with no problem. Just as Hayley had mentioned, people are born Freaks, in my groupings, people would be born swimmers. Newborns have no sense of the real world until they can get an actual glimpse which is when they can start to sink or swim. Would they have the will and drive to become a swimmer, or will they sink just as the