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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Columbine, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Violence and Spectacle
Memory, Bearing Witness, Trauma, and Testimony
Failure
Media: Misinformation and Sensationalism
Religion: Escapism, Evangelism, Opportunism
Summary
Analysis
Frank DeAngelis, a former coach who is now principal of Columbine High School, addresses the two thousand members of the student body at the end of a prep rally. He tells the students that he loves “each and every one of them” and that “his heart would break to lose just one of them.” It is Friday, April 16th, 1999, and the weekend of Columbine’s prom is here. Frank, wanting to refrain from “lecturing,” tells stories of his college friend and teenage daughter’s respective motorcycle and car accidents, imploring his students to be safe over the weekend. He instructs them each to look to their left and then to their right, and to repeat after him the words “I am a valued member of Columbine. I’m not in this alone.”
Cullen depicts Columbine before the massacre as a welcoming place where students were told that they were loved and worthy members of their community. Their principal urges them not just to consider but to actively look out for one another, and to see their classmates as individuals despite the very large student body.
Active
Themes
Frank, also known as “Mr. D,” then leads the students in a rousing chant: “We are… COL-um-BINE!” All two thousand students, says the narrator, journalist Dave Cullen, will return to school safely on Monday. On Tuesday, April 20th, 1999, however, the “worst school shooting in American history” will have occurred on Columbine’s campus. “The boys [who were] just then finalizing their plans,” Cullen says, would be “appalled” by that “characterization” of their efforts.
Active
Themes
