Theodore is thinking “In English, I open my book because the teacher is reading, and everyone else is reading along. Even though I hear the words, I forget them as soon as they’re said. I hear fragments of things but nothing whole.” Theodore is a high school student who has an abstruse past, in the young adult novel, All the Bright Places, by Jennifer Niven (Niven 266). The two main characters in the book are Theodore Finch and Violet Markey. Finch is a character who everyone regards as a “Freak”. He is a boy who has sporadic changes in his identity. He is fascinated by death. Every day he thinks of a way that he will die, but every day he also searches for something to keep him alive and he always finds something. Violet is a typical popular …show more content…
He helps her down and instead of having the school believe he saves her, he leads everyone to believe that Violet was actually the one who helps him down. Finch then requests that he and Violet be paired together for a project that has them explore Indiana. Their teacher allows Finch to work with Violet. This leads to them becoming romantically interested with one another. Finch helps Violet in becoming herself again and getting her out of her depression. He, despite having a girlfriend and everything going right for him, still finds himself not able to suppress his past. In All the Bright Places, Niven tells the reader that Finch is abused by his father and shows how Finch attempts to handle the repercussions that come from that. He is also said to have a plethora of mental illnesses which helps in understanding why he thinks and acts how he does. Niven uses this novel to show how teens are affected by their own thoughts and their peers. The perfect example for this would be the character, Theodore Finch. He allows himself to believe that nobody would care if he died because he gets bullied so frequently. All the Bright Places shows the struggles that kids face in masking their pain because they are afraid to be