The Power of Resisting - After Reading Response

To respond to my synthesis page on the book After by Anna Todd, I was looking for ways the characters resist the power of other characters, and I ended up finding a cycle of resistance connecting 5 characters in my story. I realized that even if a character fails at resisting the power of other characters, there is still a connection between every character in the story focusing on resistance.

In the story, Tessa, one of the main characters of the story, encounters Harry, the other main character of the story. In the beginning she thinks that Harry is a mean goth rebel who likes tattoos and who gets laid by a different girl every night. She is partially correct, the one thing she’s missing is the fact that she brings him the power to be kind and love. However, since she doesn’t know him that well at the time, Tessa doesn’t realize that she’s fallen for Harry. Since she is already in a relationship she knows she can’t do anything, but Harry is dangerous and lives on a high wire, and she needs that in her preppy life run by her stuck up mother. Harry is intrigued by Tessa’s uniqueness compared to other girls he’s met, she doesn’t want to mess around, she has a great sense of humor and dresses very modestly for her body. Harry needs this kind of innocence in his life to balance it out with all the inapropriate content in his life. The power Tessa tries to resist is the power of Harry’s “new type” of love, because no matter how hard she tries to resist the thought of him, he always pops right back into her head. The power he has over her is so strong that she is forced to admit to herself that she is crushing hard on him.

In addition, Tessa’s mom has always been that strict uptight parent who maps out their child’s life without their consent. So when Tessa goes off to college and find her new roommate, Stephanie has bright red hair, piercings and tattoos all over, Tessa’s mom wants to switch Tessa’s room because she knows if she doesn’t she will lose her perfect little Tessa between the deep cracks of college. But, Tessa refuses and just like her mother predicted, a few months later, when her mom comes to check in with her and finds her with Harry, she is furious. Her mom has lost the one perfect thing in her life, so now she has to fight to get it back. When her mom comes back a few month later she finds that Tessa and Harry have moved in with each other. She is so irritated with Harry, she insults him and criticizes his flaws, hoping he will fall down. But Tessa stands up for him and herself and resists the power her mother has had over her for 18 years. Even though she knows she’s breaking her mother’s heart, she knows it’s for the best. Tessa is resisting her mother’s motherly power that every mother has over their child, and the fact that she destroyed that power her mother has over her is amazing.

After making my synthesis page I realized that in almost every story, at some point every character either resists the power of one character or fails to resist the power of another. This message I think can be really helpful to young readers out there who are too scared to resist someone in their own lives who has negative power over them. And also teaching them how to resist this power, if they didn’t already know how.