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Part V: Diary 57
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Freedom Writers Diary, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Race, Ethnicity, and Tolerance
Education and Healing
Family and Home
Violence, War, and Death
Summary
Analysis
When this student reads about a character’s suicide in Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, s/he thinks about her/his own struggle with depression, a mental illness that runs in her/his family. Suicide is always on this student’s mind and once, after a fight with her/his mother, s/he even tried to cut her/his wrist with a knife. S/he realizes that s/he no longer identifies with that moment, in which s/he felt there was no alternative to her/his situation besides dying.
This student realizes that even the darkest, most dangerous, life-threatening moments in her/his life do not define her/him forever. Rather, s/he trusts that one’s circumstances and mindset can change over time until, one day, one finds that the worst moments in one’s life belong to the past.
Themes
