The Development of Peter Houghton as a Villain (Book 4 Review)

The book Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult is about the unfortunate events of a school shooting at Sterling High.  Peter is the villain in this story because he opened fire in his high school and ended up being convicted of eight first-degree murders and two second-degree murders as well as other unforgiveable damage.  Jodi Picoult does such a nice job of incorporating everyone’s thoughts in the book so that you can look at the situation from every angle.  She does a brilliant job of getting inside Peter’s head to see what led him to start these tragic events.  The stages of Peter turning into a villain are talked about below.

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.