True Notebooks by Mark Salzman: Character Analysis

Analysis of a Character
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Analysis of a Character
Adolescence is a time when young people struggle to find their true identity which naturally separates them from their parents. Teenagers personality is majorly influenced by societal values, their beliefs, and moral standards. As the teenagers struggle to find their own identity, they might find themselves on the wrong side of the law. Instead of subjecting young people to severe punishment, they should be treated with compassion and guided to give them the chance to redeem themselves and become productive members of the society.
Notebooks by Mark Salzmann offer powerful insights into the lives of young teenagers struggling to find their own identity. The author describes the day to day routine of young people living in a rehabilitation center. In his narration, one of the teenagers Francisco Javier finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Francisco had been warned by his parents for hanging around with the wrong friends, he found himself next to the shooter but he did not commit the crime. However, he was tried as an adult and sentenced to 48 years for a crime he never committed (Salzman, 2007).
Mark Salzmann worked as a volunteer teacher, teaching creative writing at the Central Juvenile Hall, a detention facility for juvenile offenders. He saw young people charged with various crimes and were struggling to make amends. Throughout his book Mark Salzmann give us a better perspective of how the juvenile system works; he describes Francisco not as a high-risk juvenile offender, but as an individual who finds himself trapped in a corrupt environment with no role model to learn from (Salzman, 2007).
Like other teenagers, Francisco seems to be lost and tries to identify himself with the wrong group, and in the process, he found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Salzmann looks at the offender's environment and reviews how it affects these young boys. After reading some of the writings from his students, he realized that most of the boys were trapped in a deviating environment with most of them lacking a decent role model; hence they do not have the chance to internalize conventional norms (Salzman, 2007).
Like many teenagers in the book, Francisco is caught in an identity crisis. Francisco Javier admits this when he writes that "Writing gives us a way of telling ...