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Overcoming Adversity A review of Dulled Imagine a world where two of you existed, someone that looked look like you, lived in the same place, but wasn’t you. And the only way you could survive was to kill your Alternate self. The book “Dulled” trough the main character illustrates that you can grow from all experiences, even if there difficult to go through. Throughout life overcoming obstacles provides opportunities to grow.
This is seen throughout the book in the challenges West Grayer faces, she loses her family, is forced to make her win difficult decisions and learns to let others care for her. Although she has never needed to make tough decisions before she is now forced to, in order to survive. She makes difficult decisions by herself and against everyone’s advice. Despite being told not follow her brother Luck and her friend Chord into the home of Chord’s Alt she does, endangering everyone there in her effort to protect them both (Chapman, p. 24-27).
She also had to decide difficult decisions not beneficial to her but to protect others. For example she rejected Chord’s offer to help her with her assignment in order to protect him by making the excruciatingly hard decision to leave him in the middle of the night so he wouldn’t have the chance to stop her (p. 1 11). She makes extremely difficult choices regarding her future in which she either lives or dies. For example when she made a Peripheral Kill even though she hated to do that to a family as it was done to her when her loved ones were killed (p. 224).
She makes the incredibly tough choice of becoming an illegal killer, a striker, even without experience or a trainer. Through West, I see that the most challenging decisions to cake can be the most significant in life and that often it’s better to decide them yourself. W est… Overcomes the devastating trauma of losing her entire family and learns to become self-supporting. Almost all the people she grew up with and dependent on were killed while getting caught in the crossfire of an assignment, a Peripheral Kill (PC) including her two brothers, sister, mother and father.
West is left to survive on her own and she has to find ways to take care of herself while dealing with grief. As described in the beginning of the story, West lives a normal life of going o school, eating three meals a day and sleeping seven hours a night despite having no one but herself to lean on. As it repeatedly states throughout the novel, she regularly travels all alone and provides money, food and shelter for herself. Like when she found her own shelter in an abandoned home when she was searching for her Alt (Chapman, p. 135).
She independently finds meaner of income by becoming a striker, which is an especially dangerous and illegal Job where she is hired by actives to kills their alternate (p. 1-76) She walks around without fear of the world, even after what happened to her family. The loss and grief West felt after her family died pushed her to keep living normally, living in their memory. Through a world where you have to fight for yourself to survive she learns to care for others and to let others care for her. Since her family died, West has only fought for herself and let no one else into her life.
When she realizes that there is no point fighting if you have no one one left who cared for her he finally she accept his help to protect and travel with ere during her “assignment” to find her Alt (p. 185). She also became very protective of Chord always worrying about his safety before her own. Not only did West open her true self up for others to grow close she learned that she needed to grow bonds of trust and relationships as well. For instance when she was doing her “assignment” she met another active named Des whom she grew close to and mentored, she taught him to fight with her weapons and protected him from danger (p. 143).
Throughout the book West learns to have trust in others, like when she gave Des two f her best Switchblades trusting him to not use them against her (p. 144). It took her a long time to learn that you always need others in your life, otherwise you have nothing to look forward to in the future. In conclusion the story in “Dulled” exemplifies how challenges no matter how difficult, when conquered can lead to personal growth. Elsie Chapman paints a character that grows through loss, difficult decision making and learning to both receive and give. Works Cited Chapman, Elsie. Dulled. United States of America: Random House Children Books, 2013