Stage 1: Injustice
Peter was bullied from
the moment he stepped on the bus for his very first day of Kindergarten and
from then on it only got worse. Bullies threw his Superman lunch box out of the
bus windows, broke his glasses, punched him, called him names, sent out his
private emails to the whole school, and even pulled down his pants in front of
the whole cafeteria. You can see only a
glimpse of the torture Peter faced when Jodi says “ and in one smooth stroke he
hooked his thumbs into the loops of Peter’s pants and yanked them down to his
ankles”(Picoult 321). All of these
injustices done to him caused him to want to fight back and get revenge on his
bullies. Peter says “I guess I should
tell you, don’t blame yourself; this isn’t your fault, but that would be a
lie. We both know that I didn’t get here
by myself” (Picoult 1). Nobody wants to
admit this, “but bad things will keep on happening. Maybe that’s because it’s all a chain, and a
long time ago someone did the first bad thing, and that led someone else to do
another bad thing, and so on” (Picoult 43).
The first bad thing someone did to Peter was throw his lunch box out the
window which led someone else to make fun of him until the torture became
endless and led him to do something unforgettable. When at his trial Peter was asked why he did
it and he answered “They started it….The bullies. The jocks.
The ones who called me a freak my whole life” (Picoult 424).
Stage 2: Obsession
Peter was provoked by
bullies so his obsession was to get revenge on those bullies and he did. He went to extreme methods to get
revenge. He made car bombs, loaded up on
weapons, targeted his victims by circling faces in the Sterling Middle School
yearbook, and then brought his weapons to school where his revenge was served. His revenge was walking over the dead bodies
that he shot and seeing the life drain out of their face. Jodi says “In nineteen minutes, you can order
a pizza and get it delivered. You can
walk a mile. You can sew a hem. In nineteen minutes, you can stop the world,
or you can just jump off it. In nineteen
minutes, you can get revenge” (Picoult 1).
Stage 3: Pride
Peter was blinded by his
plan to get revenge that he didn’t realize how catastrophic it would be. He thought he was doing the right thing for
himself because he was in a dissociative state since he struggled from
post-traumatic stress disorder. No one
was there to protect him or help him from the bullies which is why he felt so
strongly in what he did since not a single person reached out to him.
Stage 4: Isolation
Lacy Houghton, Peter’s
mom, said that Peter was always locked away in his room and always doing
something on the computer when she walked in.
He resorted to the digital world since no one was paying attention to
him in real life. He created a computer
game called “Hide-N-Shriek” where the nerds in school got to kill the
bullies. He realized how easy it was to
win in a computer game and thought he could do the same in real life. Peter says “when I did it in the game, I won”
(Picoult 425).
Stages 5&6:
Detachment and Cruelty/Wickedness
The biggest scene in the
book where I realized how Peter had no remorse for what he had done or felt was
when “he passed by the boy he’d shot who lay in a puddle of blood….and then he
sat down at one untouched tray and placed the gun on it. He opened a box of Rice Krispies and poured
them into a Styrofoam bowl. He added the
contents of a milk container and ate all the cereal before standing up again,
retrieving his pistol, and exiting the cafeteria” (Picoult 126). That moment is so chilling because Peter
obviously isn’t concerned about the disaster he just created. Instead,
he is rather calm and goes about life no differently than before he killed 10
people.
Peter had a rough and disappointing start to life. He suffered the torture of being picked on
everyday of his life which is why he resorted to such extreme methods to end it
all. His lack of remorse for what he did
and his obsession with revenge is what makes him a Villain to all whose lives were
changed drastically by him.
