Choosing to be Insurgent or Allegiant: Symbols, Themes & Analysis of the Divergent Trilogy

Choosing to be Insurgent or Allegiant

Symbols, Themes & Analysis

of the

Divergent Trilogy

by

Valerie Estelle Frankel

Copyright 2013 Valerie Estelle Frankel

Smashwords Edition

Discover other titles by Valerie Estelle Frankel at Smashwords.com:

Henry Potty and the Pet Rock

Henry Potty and the Deathly Paper Shortage

Katniss the Cattail: An Unauthorized Guide to Names and Symbols in The Hunger Games

An Unexpected Parody: The Unauthorized Spoof of The Hobbit

Winning the Game of Thrones: The Host of Characters and their Agendas

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Choosing to be Insurgent or Allegiant is an unauthorized guide and commentary on Divergent and its related universe. None of the individuals or companies associated with the books or movies or any merchandise based on this series have in any way sponsored, approved, endorsed, or authorized this book.

Contents

Introduction

Factions

Choosing Factions

Escaping the Factions

Understanding the Factions

Destroying the Factions

Dystopia

Dystopian Inspiration

Comparisons to Hunger Games

What to Wear: Dressing for Dystopia

Symbols

Beatrice’s Symbols

Ravens and Crows

Food

Names and Numbers

Vocabulary’s Deeper Meanings

The Heroine’s Journey

Savior of the Innocent

Family

Threshold

Friends, Allies, Love

Divergent’s Climax

Facing the Shadow

Wicked Stepmother

Death

Gender Roles

The Warrior Woman and Romance

Psychology Personality and Fear

Brain Chemistry

Genes

Personality Tests

The Nature of War and the Child Soldier

Themes

Coming of Age, Kids versus Adults

Prejudice

Religion

The Nature of Bravery

Free Will

Setting

Fan Responses

Movie

Future Plans

Characters of the Series

Works Cited

About the Author

Introduction

In May 2011, HarperCollins imprint Katherine Tegen Books published Divergent, the debut novel by then 22-year-old author Veronica Roth. The first in a planned trilogy, Divergent describes a future Chicago in which society is divided into five personality-based factions – Candor, Erudite, Amity, Dauntless, Abnegation – and the main character, Tris, struggles to fit into her chosen group. (C.J.)

Insurgent followed a year later, then Allegiant was published the following October, less than six months before the upcoming film from Summit Entertainment – the studio behind Twilight.

"The Hunger Games was just becoming a thing when I was finishing writing it," Roth says, and Divergent led the next wave of YA dystopian fiction. The timing worked in her favor, and so did the current distaste for fragile YA heroines like Twilight’s Bella Swan; Tris is strong and uncompromising … Despite its trendiness, Roth sees Divergent less as a traditional point a finger at society novel and more of a personal critique. (Dobbins)

The book, published by a student still in college, did astoundingly, instantly well. "Divergent was published in May 2011 and spent eleven consecutive weeks on the New York Times’ children’s best-seller list; the sequel, Insurgent, debuted at No. 1 a year later" (Dobbins). Though Roth herself joked the next book would be called Detergent, with a box of soap on the cover, Allegiant concluded the series. As with Harry Potter, Twilight, Hunger Games, and others, the fandom has been vocal and expressive, filling the internet with creative works and speaking eagerly at young adult literature conferences. One critic adds:

They not only read the books, they emotionally devour them, often multiple times. So, if a majority of readers have a gripe about a character’s motivations seeming unrealistic to the story, they most likely have a point. And whether they intend to or not, they help Roth market her series across Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and other various social media streams. There’s something special about YA readers. We are not a quiet bunch that takes reading as a personal endeavor; our engagement and emotional attachment is unparalleled in other reader groups, and to disregard that is Roth’s mistake. (White)

This style of book, which makes such an enormous impact on our teen culture, also lends itself well to scholarly examination. What can readers learn about prejudice, courage, heroism, leadership, sacrifice from reading this story. What deeper symbolism appears in Tris and Tobias’s fear landscapes? How does the heroine’s journey unfold in a dystopian world? For that matter, why are dystopias so popular now and what do they say about the current teen culture? This book explores all those questions and more, inviting readers to dig deeper through Roth’s unusual vocabulary and vibrant images to find the true meaning of being Divergent.

Factions

Choosing Factions

Tomorrow at the Choosing Ceremony, I will decide on a faction; I will decide the rest of my life; I will decide to stay with my family or abandon them, Tris says at the first novel’s opening (2). Tris explains that to live factionless is to live divorced from society, separated from the most important thing in life: community (20). Emphasis is placed on one’s adopted family of like-minded individuals, rather than the family of birth. As the story progresses, this attitude changes.

Roth explains, No one fits into a faction perfectly, so determining your aptitude is extremely difficult. But as for choosing a faction it’s all about priorities (Divergent Bonus Materials 8). Some value friendship, others bravery or knowledge. This method of sorting has been noticed by many Harry Potter fans, with its personality test and house affiliation. However, it appears a closer metaphor for today’s aptitude tests, which cleanly pigeonhole people as creative introverts suited to be painters or intellectual yet neurotic researchers in esoteric subjects. Likewise, many students pigeonhole themselves in high school. There are the jocks, the geeks, the theater crowd, the goths, or famously the outcasts who do not choose…Beatrice starts by being told all people must fit cleanly into a category, and she gradually discovers this is not true for herself, or truly for anyone around her. Roth adds:

The faction system reflects my beliefs about human nature – that we can make even something as well-intentioned as virtue into an idol, or an evil thing. And that virtue as an end unto itself is worthless to us…I think we all secretly love and hate categories – love to get a firm hold on our identities, but hate to be confined – and I never loved and hated them more than when I was a teenager. That said: Though we hear a lot about high school cliques, I believe that adults categorize each other just as often, just in subtler ways. It is a dangerous tendency of ours. And it begins in adolescence. (Amazon)

Divergence is extremely dangerous, as Tori notes, but it’s the only path to independence free from the group’s selfish morality. Divergence celebrates independent thought and diversity – questioning tests rather than succumbing to them like a sheep. The outside world has no castes, and Tris and Tobias must bring about a world in which people may join a group or not as they please, but will no longer be wholly defined by this single choice.

Escaping the Factions

"I think we’ve made a mistake ...We’ve all started to put down the virtues of the other factions in the process of bolstering our own. I don’t want to do that. I want to be brave, and selfless, and smart, and honest," Tobias tells Tris (Divergent 405). He shows her his five faction tattoos in a synthesis of the different beliefs, and as she studies from him, she comes to believe in his choice not to abandon the other factions’ lessons. Christine Weasley, author of a series of essays about the rising conflict in Divergent as seen through a lens of alchemy explains:

Overall, I think that is Roth’s ultimate goal for Tris’s character, what Tobias already understands and manifests in his back tattoo: that no one virtue supersedes another, and it is in fact necessary to develop each equally in the process of becoming a fully mature adult. (Weasley, Nigredo)

Thus, Tris refuses to be a Dauntless leader because she feels she’s truly Divergent. She notes, I am whatever I choose to be. And I can’t choose to be this. I have to stay separate from them (Insurgent 266). She dreams of being an ambassador to the other factions (Divergent 408). Like Four with his variety of tattoos, Tris feels a bond with all five communities, and displays many skills from her top three – In one instance, Tris objects to Dauntless brute force and suggests mixing it with cunning. (Insurgent 173). In turn the Dauntless ask her to guess the Erudite plans because she can think like one of them. In time, she and Four forge an alliance with the Factionless ... in return for their being part of the government to come. She values all the groups, including the one that rejects them all.

Understanding the Factions

Those virtues are the ones I believe in. And to kind of dismantle my own understanding of those virtues, or what it would be like to live this way, was a little bit like delving into my own psyche, Roth says, explaining her creation of the five factions (Dobbins).

In the second book, Tris visits all the factions and dresses in their clothes, trying to discover who she wants to become. She too is deconstructing them along with herself. I am collecting the lessons each faction has to teach me, and storing them in my mind like a guidebook for moving through the world. There is always something to learn, always something that is important to understand (Insurgent 269). In each place, she has a life-changing moment as she faces the essence of that Faction:

Visiting Amity, Tris brawls with Peter and is injected with their serum of peace and happiness. She skips and smiles, and to Tobias’s view is acting like a lunatic. She’s flirtatious, happy, and worry-fee, things she hasn’t been since the attack on Abnegation. Tris counters that They put me in a good mood, that’s all (62). When Tobias sees it’s worn off, he says, Thank God … I was beginning to think it would never wear off and I would have to leave you here to … smell flowers, or whatever you wanted to do while you were on that stuff (67). Tobias later comments that Tris possibly didn’t fight it off because on some level she wanted to feel Amity’s peace and lack of responsibility. Sometimes, people just want to be happy, even if it’s not real, he adds (68). Following this, Tris wears baggy red pants and aids the other rebels to escape disguised as Amity, playing and laughing in the corridor. Her own experience there has granted her a deeper understanding of them, so much so that she can appear one of them.

No factions? A world in which no one knows who they are or where they fit? I can’t even fathom it. I imagine only chaos and isolation, Tris thinks at the second book’s beginning (110). After, however, she eats diner among the Factionless, rides a train with them, wears their clothes, and washes up in their all-too-public bathroom. Among the Factionless, Tris borrows clothes and again appears one of them in jeans and a black shirt that is so loose up top that it slips off my shoulders, indicating how badly she fits among them (Insurgent 115). She also meets Tobias’s mother Evelyn and discusses strategy with her. Evelyn suggests Tris become important and help bring about a world without factions, giving Tris a Factionless path to follow. They all laugh. We all laugh. And it occurs to me that I might be meeting Tobias’s true faction. They are not characterized by a particular virtue. They claim all colors, all activities, all virtues, and all flaws as their own (409-410).

Tris undergoes a grueling initiation in Candor, interrogated before the