Adah in "The Poisonwood Bible"

A character from The Poisonwood Bible who I liked more than the others was Adah Price. Throughout the novel, she was disconnected from the world and the other characters. She did not speak throughout her childhood, and very much kept to herself. This allowed her opinion to be uninfluenced by others, as she did not tell them what she thought of things. She also saw the world in a very different manner than the other characters did. This was partially due to the fact that she had a handicap, and partially due to her increased intelligence. Her opinions and perspectives also seemed to be more pure than he others’ because of the fact that she did not fully participate in the world as others did.

Adah chose not to speak when she was young because of her anger with the world and with God. She was more sensitive than the other members of her family to the hardships and unfair pain that many had to struggle through because she had to struggle through life due to her handicap. Because of her firsthand experience with adversity, Adah became aware, early in life, of the inequitable distribution of affliction in the world. She was wiser than the other Prices, because her living inside of herself and contemplating on the troubles of humanity. For instance, Adah question her Sunday school teacher when she said that African children were damned to hell because they were born in a place where Christianity was not regularly taught. The other children, at that age, seemed to simply accept what they were told as fact. Adah considered what she was told before accepting it. I liked Adah because of her individuality and ability to really think about things before believing them.

I also liked that Adah was so different from her family and from others in the book. Each of the characters perceived the worlds in their own way, and were different from one another, but Adah’s differences were more interesting than the rest because she seemed to live and think in a completely different manner than the others. This is because she grew up unlike her siblings. She was raised in the same environment, but almost lived in a different place, in a sense, because she built her own world inside herself rather than really living in the house with her family.

When Adah grew up, she almost completely overcame the disabilities that plagued her throughout her young life. She learned to walk normally, as she could not when she was young, and began to speak as though she had never been silent. She also went to medical school and became a doctor, before she was even able to walk well. This is another aspect of Adah that I really like. She did not let the world keep her down because she was different. Even though she did succeed in life, she never completely lost who she was. She became more logical and slightly more normal, but was still, essentially, the same person.