Essay

Actions speak louder than words. But it is the occurrences that lead up to actions that sometimes make the action so unthinkable. This is defiantly the case in Jodi Picoult’s book, Nineteen Minutes. Peter Houghton, a seventeen year old high school student is bullied to the point where he brings upon a school shooting. The book goes back and forth between his current life and his past. Picoult finds a way to make her readers sympathize for Peter although he has committed an inexcusable crime.
At first, you simply despise Peter for bringing chaos to everyone, and taking lives of his fellow classmates. But as the book continues, you learn how he was so fed up with being harassed all his life that when he reached his braking point unnoticed, he felt like he had no other way to express his hatred for the people who literally made his life a living hell. Picoult makes your feel sorry for him as you would an abused puppy that learns to bite back. Peter has one person he looks to as a friend, Josie Cormir, and even she is so caught up in popularity that she has shoved him aside in order to keep her status as “cool”.
Although Peter has a tough essence about him during the trial, his true character becomes apparent during the chapters of his childhood up until the day of the shooting. He never provoked anyone to be mean to him, and yet he was the punching bag from the start. By Picoult showing an elementary boy getting picked on for the way he looks, it really gives the reader no choice but to sympathize for him and even to justify his actions. He had done nothing wrong to these kids and yet they never let up on him. Picoult shows Peter at his weakest, which happens to be most of his life, to make one feel bad for him. She obtains something many can not, she makes her readers want to defend a killer.
One could argue that Peter felt so trapped and abandoned by everyone in his life that he wasn’t mentally stable and what he did wasn’t really his conscious self’s fault. Even as the book talks about the ones who were killed and their families, you wonder if their parents knew what kind of person their child really was. How they would be ashamed of them if they knew what they did to make Peter take such drastic measures. Picoult artfully wrote Nineteen Minutes so that the reader would have polar opposite feeling about the same person. Peter is both an innocent child who is bullied everyday and a knowledgeable being who took people’s lives from them.
In the end, Peter is found guilty, as he should be. But you can’t help but still have that little part of you that wishes he got the benefit of the doubt and got a short sentence. Picoult is an amazing writer because of this reason; she makes you feel for someone who did something awful. Over all, actions do speak louder then words and horrible ones blind all the little incidents leading up to them.