I am drawn to literature that takes place in a dystopia, defined as “a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and over-crowding.” What makes this genre of fiction so hard to put down? To offer a stark contrast to dystopia, a utopia is a place compromised of social, political, and environmental perfection. Dystopian novels describe societies that offer very little to the people within them. Post-apocalyptic fiction takes place after some form of a catastrophe occurs that ends normal ways of living. Science fiction distorts what we know about science, and pushes the boundaries of reality. These genres have similarities, and can even coincide with one another.
In science fiction, for example, a disastrous event may begin a post-apocalyptic period. Such an event may be a result of worldly problems such as climate, war, and medical pandemics, or it could be other-worldly forces causing chaos and collapse on Earth. What was once a utopian society may fall into a dystopia due to an overwhelming factor chosen by the author. While a post-apocalyptic or science fiction genre story may take place in a dystopian-like setting, dystopian societies fall apart due to neglect by or abuse of the system, such as a government, that rules them. The main character then struggles against the corrupt society to achieve a better way of living.
I decided to take a look at Veronica Roth’s elaborately designed society in the Divergent trilogy, Chicago, from the perspective of someone who has read the entire series. (Spoiler alert: sorry!) As we find out at the end of the second novel, Insurgent, the wall around the city is designed to keep everyone inside the experiment known as the faction system. In order to rebuild society after its own self-destruction, it was decided that people would live in separate factions, each based on a dominant characteristic that the faction would be centered on. The people in control then decided that some individuals would have strong characteristics of multiple factions. The hope was that these individuals, referred to as “Divergent” would emerge from the city and help the outside world eliminate the conflict and terror that inspired the experiment.
Good intentions aside, the faction system backfired. The factions each scrambled for power
over one another, and those with divergent personalities were the only people who could escape a war. The society tore itself apart, leaving people factionless, homeless, hungry, and afraid, the perfect image of a dystopia. I chose this series to analyze because it’s overarching moral is that no one fits into one category. We are all, as individuals, unique, and having one thing in common will not unite us all. We each have different thoughts, traditions, faiths, and purposes.
So What?
Roth described a world in which humans destroyed each other because their factions did not agree. If this sounds familiar, it is. There are abhorrent things going on in the world for reasons just like this. In dystopian novels like Divergent, the reader has the opportunity to imagine themselves in the midst of the chaos. It may make the reader question if they are strong enough to endure the misery experienced in the books, or, more specific to Divergent, is the world better divided?
Today, we have different political parties that trample over each other to get the most votes and satisfy the majority of people, meanwhile ignoring the problems that need to be addressed in the minority. Starvation, homelessness, disease, and hate all exist in the real world, and many of these problems exist because we are unable to unite and find a solution. I think that this genre grabs the attention of the young adults because while dystopian literature is fiction, it draws ideas from reality. Reality is not far from what we call a dystopia.
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Works Cited
Reasoning, Comparative. “It's Time For A New Political Party.” Medium, Medium, 5 Aug. 2018, medium.com/@comparativereasoning/its-time-for-a-new-political-party-fb0fa5a70328.
Roth, Veronica. Divergent. HarperCollinsPublishers, 2014.
Stein, Jess M. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language. Random House, 1971.
Unknown. “Divergent by Veronica Roth.” Get Hooked on Books, 1 Jan. 1970, hookedonbooksreview.blogspot.com/2012/12/divergent.html.
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