Stuck In Neutral Character Analysis

Improved Essays
Stuck in neutral is a story about fourteen year old Shawn McDaniel who suffers from cerebral palsy. This means that Shawn can’t walk, talk, move his legs, move his arms or even smile. However, he has the special ability to remember anything he’s ever heard, from the most basic conversations to the boring TV commercials. The only thing is, that with his condition, he can’t tell anyone what he knows, he can’t tell anyone that he’s alive in his dysfunctional body and that he’s not a complete retard. The only time he truly feels alive is when he has an occasional seizure, which, according to him, they don’t hurt at all but actually make him happy because he gets a sense of freedom. Shawn’s father on the other hand, thinks his son is suffering and in pain. He can’t bear to see his son in pain and wants to end Shawn’s suffering. This leads Shawn to suspect that his dad might want to kill him...out of love. …show more content…
Shawn’s mom is his primary caretaker, she feeds him and takes care of his needs everyday (Shawn’s dad had left them shortly after Shawn was born because he couldn’t bear to see Shawn having his seizures). He goes to school but is in the Severely/Profoundly Handicapped Special Education Program, which he calls the retard class. His dad came in one day, with a cameraman from the local PBS station and started talking about disabled kids who can’t be educated. Even though a seizure came over Shawn, he still picked up the words “end his

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Mercs are the main individuals sufficiently distraught to make due in this terrible future. Keep the dingy survivors safe and your firearm stacked in Kill Me Again. Reveal the plot behind the mutant episode. Escape through the city lanes in a steady battle for your life. Get new firearms, update your survival rigging, and assemble a system of associates to help you firearm down the mutants as they swarm toward you.…

    • 392 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    You should always make the choice that feels right to you. When you make decisions you should trust your instincts. Eli the main character from, The Compound, written by S.A. Bodeen, did this well. He knew his dad was trying to hide something from him. When he started finding clues in his dad´s office, he started to realize his dad has been keeping secrets from his own family for the last six years while they were in the compound.…

    • 501 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    As the summer of 1962 rolls in, Jack is encaged with an unknown murderer and faces many other mysteries. In the novel, Dead End In Norvelt, the author (Jack Gantos) sends the audience into a thrilling world. In a small town filled to the rim with quirky neighbors lives Jack and his parents. The first day of summer had finally came. The relief flooded him.…

    • 1131 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    As a rule, what surrounds a character in a book, either a different culture, or geography, tends to change their moral principles. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, is a perfect example of how even though someone has everything they need, they can end up doing insane things. Mccandless, the main character, is affected by extreme environmental surroundings, because his thinking shifts from being brave to feeling morally guilty . Cristopher, used to have all he wished, but because of his solipsistic personality, this wasn't enough.…

    • 291 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Adverse, confusing, hopeless-they're all words that describe Nevaeh Anderson's life despite her wealthy upbringing. She has a mile long list of all the boyfriends she's had, she has smoked and drank numerous times, and she has woken up in too many strangers' beds. To top it all off, she's only 17. Her mother is too busy battling her own demons to scold her, and her father is too caught up in his work to notice that she's falling over the edge.…

    • 241 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    “You see, freedom has a way of destroying things.” (Scott Westerfeld). Man’s greatest want, creates our biggest fear. And what gives the human species more freedom than technology. The ability to travel the world in a few short weeks, create things that would otherwise be impossible, and our favorite, the ability to obtain knowledge far beyond the average human's capability through the internet.…

    • 465 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the film, “Sean’s Story”, Sean Begg is an 8 year old boy with Down Syndrome. Him and his parents had been enduring a seven year fight to have Sean placed in a regular public school. Previously, he was enrolled in a contained classroom in a school for children with disabilities. Throughout the film, audiences are able to observe the controversial experiences Sean and his family withstood as well as compare his new life in a general education classroom to his former life in a special education classroom. Analyzing various aspects of communication, collaboration, and Sean’s improvements by the end of his first public school year allow viewers to critique the educational decisions made in Sean’s life.…

    • 922 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Robertson Davies explores in Fifth Business the conflict between love of others and love of ourselves. The characters in the novel are not attached to only one person in physically or spiritually, because they only love themselves and just seek for their own pleasures. Ironically, people want to love and also want freedom. Human’s behaviors are in order to satisfy their own desires, that shows love is selfish. Dunstan’s love to Mary Dempster is selfless because he does not want to get anything as a return from Mary.…

    • 867 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Character Analysis 42

    • 1570 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Movie Character Analysis: 42, The True Story of An American Legend In 2013, a director named Brian Helgeland came out with a movie called “42”, an inspiring, true story about the life of Jackie Robinson and his role in breaking baseball’s color barrier. The story begins in the mid 1940s, when Major League Baseball was a “white’s only” sport and african americans could only play in a separate league by themselves. In this film, legendary Brooklyn Dodgers manager, Branch Rickey (played by Harrison Ford) brings a new, unorthodox opinion to the table. He wants to bring in an african american baseball player from the Negro Leagues, to come play for the Dodgers and to eventually break down baseball’s unspoken color barrier.…

    • 1570 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Throughout the novel of “The Damage Done” Warren Fellow’s experiences and hardships he finds himself faced with cause on-going anguish both mentally and physically. These aspects of his unjust life in prison and the events preceding convince Warren into believing that his punishment was not justified, or even remotely equal to his crimes that led to his arrest. There are multiple excerpts from book that can confirm and justify his beliefs of unjust incarceration. One of them includes a quote from page 137 that follows, “Suddenly, my punishment seemed way out of proportion and I couldn’t see the lesson that was to be learned. How much suffering was I to go through before the world agreed that I had paid my price?”…

    • 2293 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    A Not-So-Silver Lining The stigma of mental illness is as follows: crazy eyes, a lot of violence, mood swings every two seconds, and not a lot of friends and family to help. But, there are multiple factors and explanations for why a person is the way they are, and why they developed the mental illness that they did. Pat Solitano, a middle-aged white man with a lot of great qualities, was a happy-go-lucky kind of guy. He had a wife, a great job as a high school history teacher, and was living comfortably in the middle class.…

    • 1197 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    1984 Character Analysis

    • 1126 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Do you ever feel like you need to do something but you just don’t know what it is? Imagine this, but if you don 't figure out what it is, you get physically and mentally tortured. This is what happens to Winston Smith in 1984 after he has been caught going against his government 's ideas. Since Winston is tortured physically and mentally, he has no choice but to conforms to the Party’s ideals.…

    • 1126 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    A Changing World Could you imagine one of your siblings being banished from your family? In the fictional novel, Under the Bridge by Michael Harmon published in 2012, the main character and narrator Tate experiences this problem with his brother Indy. Tate’s family lives in Spokane, Washington Indy believes he never gets the respect his brother does from his parents. Indy is capable of being a well-rounded person as shown through his writing skills but denies to be that type of person. Because of this, Indy rebels and shows nothing but disrespect to his family.…

    • 1195 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Many studies show what personality traits can affect schizophrenia. John Forbes Nash Jr. showed an interesting personality trait that amplified his schizophrenic disorder. According to Capps (2004), his narcissism not only intensified his schizophrenia, but it helped in his recovery or repression of his schizophrenia. The movie, A Beautiful Mind, attempts to convey the life of Nash in a way that is understandable to all. The movie begins while he is in graduate school at Princeton University and it goes throughout his life, showing his falling in love with his wife, the birth of their first son, and his first admittance into a mental hospital.…

    • 1281 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The Messenger Essay “In order for a text to be successful, characters must undergo meaningful change” In The Messenger, novelist Markus Zusak records the experiences of Ed Kennedy, the protagonist, as he undergoes changes that enable him to find himself, giving his a life a purpose. As the novel begins, Ed is a lazy and underachieving teenager who drives taxi-cabs for a living. Ed is laid back with little life aspirations.…

    • 1245 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays