Whale Talk Paper

The better you know yourself, the better chance you have of staying out of trouble. High school is a pretty sketchy place full of sketchy people. People are growing up and in the process try to find them self. Sometimes I don’t think people remember how lonely it can be to be a kid. Growing up isn’t an easy task and when people are desperate for answers they turn to friends, which sometimes isn’t the best idea. The quote from Whale Talk by Chris Crutcher “The better you know yourself the better chance you have of staying out of trouble”, means that if you don’t who you are you might end up somewhere you don’t like. Certain characters in Whale Talk display feelings of not knowing themselves and the results are both good and bad.
More often than not knowing who you truly are is a bad thing, in these cases they’ve turned out ok. TJ Jones, the main character of Whale Talk, may not know exactly who he is but he tries his best to be a good person. TJ takes advantage of the rest of his swim team who obviously are lost themselves. TJ tries his best to lead the swim team down a positive path, making everyone learn about themselves and each other alike. Georgia Brown is another positive character in Whale Talk. Georgia is one of TJ’s old friends who cared for him when he was a kid and up for adoption. Georgia along with TJ’s adopted dad are chiefly responsible for TJ’s good nature and offer guidance to him when it’s needed. These are examples of when good people guided people who didn’t know who they were to become good people also, which is never bad.
Uncertainty of who you are could be dangerous. Not knowing who you are or where you want to be will make you become someone that is easily controlled and someone that gets into trouble. Whenever your lost and don’t know your true identity any guidance is always welcomed, the problem is not all advice is good. Mike Barbour and Rich Marshall are the two main antagonists in Whale Talk and kind of feed each other’s bad advice,...