Four

Posted Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Actual Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

I now understand why there has been so much hype surrounding this book, it truly is an excellent and well told story. There were a couple minor things which were daunting enough to cause me to resurface from the novel, but overall I was drawn in to Tris’s world of choices, factions, and a world on the brink of chaos. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in dystopian fiction.

Because my review discusses some very specific events, I will hide the majority of it under a spoiler tag out of respect for non-readers who may come across it.

Suicide and the Dauntless

Suicide is an extremely sensitive topic for me, therefore I could not support nor could I just read through the Dauntless’s treatment of suicide. Eric’s speech at Al’s funeral was incredibly disturbing, treating the whole idea of death as moving on to another adventure that the living can’t experience and calling it the “ultimate act of bravery.” In truth, a great many individuals will tell you that suicide is actually the highest form of cowardice because you ultimately allow yourself to fear living, truly living and experiencing the world with all of its joy and pain. I understand the logical implications behind why the Dauntless view suicide in this manner, it is part of the psychology behind building/creating the perfect response pattern in individuals of each faction and ensuring predictability in how each individual will react to any given situation. Regardless, I had to take a break from the book at that point because of how much this view of suicide impacted my immersion in Tris’s world. Suicide isn't an act which should ever be glorified…

Tris and Self-Sacrifice

Before I had any real idea of what Divergent was and long before I read it, I recall there being a multitude of fan outrage at the idea that Tris would be so willing to sacrifice herself in order to save Four/Tobias not even moments after her parents had sacrificed themselves for her. Personally, I wasn't outraged by this at all since it fell completely in line with what Four/Tobias had been attempting to teach Tris the entirety of her initiation into Dauntless. The entirety of Four/Tobias’s teachings involving Tris were to exemplify the idea that Abnegation’s virtue of selflessness could in itself exemplify the Dauntless virtue of bravery. In my mind, Tris was able to truly embrace who she is in that moment by acting not in the mindset of a single faction, therefore further avoiding acting in a predictable manner, rather she truly embraced the two factions that she was born from in her effort to not only save Four/Tobias but to put an end to the bloodshed caused by the Erudite’s control of the Dauntless. I think Tris’s coming to understand Four/Tobias’s teachings and manifesting them in this manner was truly well done.

World Building

My biggest concern in regards to Divergent is that there wasn't an acceptable amount of world building. The five factions exist, but why do they exist? What does it truly mean to be Divergent? Our setting is Chicago, what happened to the rest of the United States? What event took place to cause Chicago to be in the destroyed state that it is? I am sure I could continue to generate questions and I am also certain that some of these questions will be answered in the remaining two novels of the trilogy, but I felt that certain ones should have been addressed in this novel in order to provide us with a firm foundation of Tris’s world even as her understanding of it changes as she experiences the different factions herself and matures.

With these thoughts and impressions of Divergent finally realized and no longer floating around in my head, I am now ready to continue following Tris’s adventures in Insurgent and eventually Allegiant. Avoiding spoilers can become quite difficult in the Tumblr world, but so far I haven’t had the story spoiled for me and I hope it remains that way til the very end.

Originally posted on my Tumblr.