Death By Society Analysis

In seventh and eighth grade, Allison Clarke’s* murder attempts kick-started the best writing piece I’ve ever created.

Let me clarify: she never put a knife to my throat or a gun to my head. Allison attempted murder in the subtle ways that bullies do. She wanted to see me break down, but I was too hard, too jaded by that point to care about what she did to me. Well, almost too hard and jaded. The rumors she spread about me, the insults about the natural hair I couldn’t afford to upkeep properly, and the wads of paper she enjoyed throwing at my back felt like severe punishmentsfor a crime I never committed.

To deal with Allison’s childish behavior, I did what I did best: I wrote about my feelings. Through at least one hundred angry songs, I retold tales of her daunting actions. I used admittedly whiny poetry, as teenagers do, to wonder why she liked to target me in particular. And through Death by Society, I created a fictional universe where I came to terms with how I felt about her and …show more content…
In it, I use the viewpoints of four different girls to send a message about the effects of bullying on the bullied, bullies, and bystanders. Carter Harper is the misunderstood gothic who was into computers, cutting, and contemplation. Lilly Fieldsman is an innocuous popular girl who saves Carter’s life. Carrie Aren is a mean popular girl who loved shopping and ruining Carter’s days. Slater Schaeffer is a quiet bystander who’s afraid revealing her lesbian identity and, therefore, telling the world she’s different. These characters deliberately sound stereotypical, but I gave them all qualities and backstories to make them unique, showing the reader that we all have yin and yang, good and bad, inside of us. Although my goal for the story has changed with revision and time, by creating this story I hoped Allison would eventually find it and realize she couldn’t treat people unkindly and expect consequences to not arise from her