Nineteen Minutes: Character Sketch

Caroline Oden

Character Sketch

Peter Houghton was a boy who struggled in school socially, for he was everyone’s target. Peter was bullied which made him feel unaccepted, and unsure of himself. He felt that he didn’t belong anywhere, including his family, who he thought only cared about his older brother Joey. The first time that I met Peter in the book, I thought of him as a smaller, nerdy guy. He appeared to me as someone who had anger management and hated the world because he felt he didn’t belong in it. Peter reminds me of a boy that I knew a couple years ago. He was easy to pick on and was very easy to anger. Peter is somewhat like this for the same reasons. Through reading about Peter and his story of how he killed ten of his classmates during a school shooting, I have learned that he felt unwanted in the world and felt that he needed revenge against the popular kids who had bullied him over the years. He initially wanted to kill himself. This shows that he felt as though everyone on Earth would be better off without him, and would have better, happier lives if he weren’t alive. Even when Peter was young he was picked on. One day on the first day of kindergarten, “He was riding inside a bus. And he was sitting next to his best friend in the whole world. “Cool lunch box,” Josie said. He held it up, to show her the way that you could make Superman look like he was moving if you wiggled it, and just then a hand reached across the aisle. A boy with ape arms and a backward baseball cap grabbed the lunch box out of Peter’s grasp. “Hey, freak,” he said, “you want to see Superman fly?” Before Peter understood what the older boy was doing, he opened a window and hurled Peter’s lunch b ox out of it…Peter sank back into his seat. His face felt cold, but his ears were burning. He could hear the boy and his friends laughing, as loud as if it were happening in his own head” (66). This quote tells us that even when Peter was young, all he wanted was to fit in, but he never did. He was prejudged and bullied by everyone, regardless if they knew him or not.