The Freedom Writers Diary Literary Elements

Autobiographical non-fiction

A high school in Long Beach, California between 1994 and 1998, covering the four-year transition from freshman year to senior year.

The book is comprised of multiple narrators in the form of first-person perspective diary entries.

The tone varies throughout according to content of each diary, but overall the mood remains optimistic, positive, and committed to the concept of change for the better.

Protagonists: the Freedom Writers. Antagonist: social ills ranging from racism to anti-Semitism to gang violence to drug abuse and more.

The primary conflict at work in the text pits the desire and ambition of those involved in the Freedom Writers program against external forces seeking to obstruct it either through active interference or the consequences of indifference.

The book reaches its climax with the moment that the students decide to adopt the name Freedom Writers for themselves in honor of the Freedom Riders of the Civil Rights Movement.

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The name “Freedom Writers” is an allusion to the “Freedom Riders” movement during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s seeking to bring about social change through a concerted voter registration effort.

One of the dominant pieces of imagery in the book is that of a peanut shell. The students receive an assignment to describe both the exterior and interior of a peanut as a lesson in learning to judge a person by what is on the inside rather than superficial external appearance.

Demonstrated primarily through expressions of personal stories of students. For instance, one student writes of the paradox of growing up in a society that often singles out the father as the center of moral authority within a family unit when her own reality is the confirmation that her father is the last person she would seek for moral guidance.

A major thematic unifying technique of the book is the persistent parallel drawn between Anne Frank and Zlata Filipovic, both of whom authored diaries about living under horrifically oppressive regimes. In turn, the diaries of the Freedom Writers are pulled into the parallel structure as expressions of living under various—less intense—types of oppressive circumstances.

When a student asks “What’s the Holocaust?” Ms. Gruwell is shocked. Thus begins an earnest and devoted effort to learn about the full extent of the atrocities committed by the Nazis which falls under the metonymic umbrella reference of Holocaust.

From the Peanut Game exercise: “Slowly my peanuts began to take form. I wasn’t afraid because they weren’t accompanied by a tophat, tap shoes, and a corny jingle. Instead they began to have purpose, they began to set goals, dreams, and ambitions. My peanuts, before my very eyes, changed into human beings.”