Nineteen Minutes - Setting

Megan Rooney

Nineteen Minutes- Setting

The settings of the novel Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult includes the Cormier's house, the courtroom, and the jail, among others, but i think one of the most important and pivotal locations in this book is Sterling High School. Nineteen Minutes takes place mainly in the spring and summer of 2007, but significant portions of the novel are made up of flashbacks, starting from the day the Peter and Josie’s mothers met in a pregnancy class up until even the day of the murders. One of the main settings is the school where Peter goes on a killing spree, slaughtering ten and injuring even more. This setting, while not frequented by the characters because it holds such horrible memories, is essential to the story since it was where the shooting occurred. Nineteen Minutes is all about the causes, events, and effects of such a tragedy, and therefore it is probably the most important of all the settings. When Patrick rushes to the scene while Peter is still at large, the warzone he encounters is chaotic- “a constellation of students running out of the school... holding up a sign... that read ‘HELP US’... sobbing... blood melting pink on the snow... parents... screaming out names of their missing children... not enough ambulances, not enough officers, and no plan for how to react when the world as you know it went to pieces... the worst thing Patrick had ever seen... [hours later,] there were still students streaming out of Sterling High...the mass exodus... [left them] hyperventilating or hysterical...in shock.... the fire alarms were still ringing... shattered glass, fire engines, smoke. Blood... sirens” (21-50). The school is basically abandoned for almost a year. None of the kids who were at school that day can bear to return to the place where they lost friends, classmates, and a teacher. It just reminded them a day that many wanted to forget- a day that changed their lives forever. On the one year anniversary of the shooting, we see Sterling High School again, reopened, “an enormous glass atrium covered the sot where the gymnasium and locker room had been... to one side of the atrium, [there] were ten charirs, unlike the rest of the seats in the atrium, these had back and were painted white. You had to look closely to see that they had been bolted to the floor... they did not have names or placards on them, but everyone knew why they were there.” (454). This memorial is reminding all the students that while where the horrible murders took place were gone, the memories of the kids that died were not. They will always be remembered, and couldn’t be forgotten if they tried. It was necessary to change the scenery; if not, I doubt they could take being there. I would not like to be in this setting, neither on the day of the shooting or three hundred sixty-five days later. Its frightening and terrible and just plain scary when the event took place; its solemn and silent and still a little frightening at the memory of what happened a year later. It would be hard to trust kids at school if I had been in this setting.