I asked Dr. Louise Freeman, our resident Divergent authority, to share her predictions last week and she wrote me to say that what she’d already written would suffice. In bullet point form, her predictions were:
- Marcus redeemed and dead,
- Caleb probably just dead,
- Pit flooded and
- Tris leading a group of Dauntless back up the Hancock tower.
That’s about 50%, I’d say, depending on how you score Tris’ trip up the Tower. If you think that’s bad forecasting, (a) that’s very good for a HogwartsProfessor and (b) we specialize in exegesis, not tea leave reading. Read Prof Freeman’s brilliant A Dip in the OCEAN: Divergent Factions and the Big Five Personality Factors and A Dip in the OCEAN II: Double Dipping Dauntless: Can the neurotic be brave? for more along those lines!
In her alchemical predictions about the Rubedo elements to look for in Allegiant, Christine Wesley forecast so many details of the finale that I’m obliged to urge you to follow the link! No bullet point list could do it justice. I hope Christine will share her own scoring of her prediction in her hermetic follow-up to these predictions.
Her biggest hit, I think, was her writing that there would be a Marcus-Johanna alliance and her biggest miss was her Serum Theory of what caused the Chicago Experiment in Faction Living. I’m not sure I agree with the readers who wrote on the day of release that they wished Christine had written the ending because they were so disappointed in Allegiant and thought the Rubedo described here would have been more interesting, but I share their admiration for the alchemical alternative.
I didn’t make predictions except for a playful listing of possibilities of why there was a Five Faction World in the first place:
We are in the last months before Allegiant is published, which publication will reveal at last the secrets of the post-apocalypse Divergent psycho-drama theme park in Chicago.
Is it a mad scientist turned voyeur experiment for broadcasting a la The Truman Show? Are Tris and Tobias starring in another re-make of Special Service?
An Art Farm for human beings set up by aliens akin to King’s Under the Dome?
Or is this something like the Chicago ‘Projects,’ urban renewal and political correctness become self-perpetuating nightmare? Is Divergent something of a psychologist’s Cabrini Green?
I think that last one is close to a bulls eye strike and the first one came to mind a few times when we sat with those out at O’hare airport monitoring life in the Factions Project. Just sayin.’
Please share your thoughts in the comment boxes below, especially if you know of a Divergent expert who guessed, I mean, predicted a good deal of what we saw in Allegiant — without, that is, having procured a copy in advance…
“I’m not sure I agree with the readers who wrote on the day of release that they wished Christine had written the ending because they were so disappointed in Allegiant.”
I can’t wait for the Hogwarts Professor reading of Allegiant, then! I’m “disappointed”/dissatisfied (disappointed seems to suggest an emotional rather than analytical response) because Allegiant leaves a lot unresolved, or attempts to resolve it in a manner that seems abrupt/underdeveloped, which is why I found Christine’s version more satisfying.
As I mentioned earlier, Allegiant was not the book I was expecting and the decision to kill Tris was a shocker. I don’t think the population of Hunger Games readers who were broken-hearted over Prim’s death are going to cope well with this one at all.
I think I am going to have recover a few days and then re-read it to decide whether I think this was a disappointment or not.
I think the Headmaster is being generous in giving me a 50 on my predictions scorecard, though the Dauntless did make two trips up the Hancock Tower and, in addition to it, rather than the Pit, as for Uriah, being the site of Tris’s funeral, it is were most of the former Dauntless relocated. And plans for refilling the lake are at least underway.
I will also take credit for predicting Christina would wind up as the “heart” of the story, given that she saves Tobias from mind-wiping himself and is clearly part of helping him heal emotionally, just as she was for Tris. Though a chaste one,there seems to be a kind of alchemical pairing of Tobias and Christina at the end. Tobias has just come off the zipline, where he “tastes bile;” he mentioned that Christina had selected the silver urn for Tris’s ashes (the color of mercury) and their friendship is marked by “bickering” as if they were the quarreling couple.
I found it interesting that, even without the faction system, most people wound up in similar roles: Cara and Caleb working in science labs, George, Zeke and Amar in security, Tobias (who always was as suited for Abnegation as he was for Dauntless) in government. The one exception is Christina, who, though she lives with the former Dauntless in the Hancock Tower, is working to relocate refugees…. a very Abnegation type of job, specifically, what Tris’s mother would have done. On the last page, Christina “mimics” Tobias, something Tris, with her mirror-neuron- stuffed brain was always good at, leaving me to wonder if she will eventually take Tris’s place in Tobias’s life. Christina and Tobias could wind up as their generation’s Natalie and Andrew: a couple who may lack the pure passion of Tobias and Tris and may fight more than most, but who ultimately care deeply for each other and will dedicate their lives to bettering their society. Could New Chicago, the “fourth city” become “Four’s City?”
I also like that there is some small doorway open for a sequel; with trouble-makers on the fringe still wanting war, Marcus MIA and Peter, with some of his evil still intact, up in Milwaukee ready to be deployed. In the end, it may not be so much a question of whether Tobias can tell the rest of his story without Tris, but whether Ms. Roth can.
Veronica Roth has a post on her blog today about why she ended Allegiant the way she did. (http://veronicarothbooks.blogspot.com/2013/10/about-end-of-allegiant-spoilers.html)
It’s interesting. I guess I didn’t feel like the theme of the series was so much selflessness in the form of self-sacrifice, as it was for Tris to learn to do the right thing. Her choice to work with Four’s dad at the end of Insurgent felt selfless enough to me, in that she was willing to gamble her relationship with Four to do what she thought was best for the whole. And I felt like her choice at the end of Allegiant was basically the same – to sacrifice what she could have had for what she thought was best for everyone. It was nice to have her see herself in her brother, and forgive him that way. But I felt like she didn’t grow much from the end of Insurgent to the end of Allegiant. I was fine with her dying, and I thought that was some of the best writing in the book. But I can see why a lot of readers feel caught off guard.
And I still can’t decide if we as readers are supposed to feel like the factions were bad, or good, or had just gotten a bit corrupted, or didn’t actually matter at all. Louise’s point that the characters are in basically the same place in Allegiant as they were drawn in Divergent felt more like going in circles than coming full circle. It’s one of a few plot points that make me wish things had been more connected between Divergent and Allegiant. All the things that could have been done with Tris’ mom!
Someone online was saying Allegiant makes more sense as Four’s story than Tris’, which I kind of agree with. (despite Roth’s blog explanation)
Spoilers included:
I expected that the faction experiment was set up to enrich for the divergent, which I expected would be a personality type based on a high level of intuition as a trait. I expected that they were enriching for these individuals who were hard tested by oppression within the factions to become leaders in the world on the outside. I assumed that the factions experiment was set up to protect those individual from whatever happened outside…was assuming some sort of biological/chemical/nuclear warfare took place. I was really hoping for a Tris and Tobias take on Evelyn and then the rest of the world type of story.
After Tris and Tobias underwent genetic testing, I expected the Bureau to separate them because of their differing test results, but this never happened.
Despite plenty of anvils that Tris and Tobias were soulmates, I believe the author also set up a lot of anvils in the first two books that Tris was earmarked for a Christ-like death. I found the symbolic death and resurrection she experienced in Insurgent to be much more moving and complete than the one we got in Allegiant, which fell flat for me.
I feel like the pacing in this book was off because of the switching in POV between Tris and Tobias, which created problems reading the book as I had to go back and forth to check chapter headers frequently. Not only did Tris die, but we experienced less of her in this book, so it felt rushed, and the payoff was less.
I too felt like the book was very rushed… too many layers and revolutions that suddenly resolve. I think that was partly the point, though– to show that revolution doesn’t create easy answers. I think the scene between Tobias & Evelyn was beautiful– as he explains why the Factions were inadequate (as is enforced “factionless-ism”): they gave an illusion of choice without any true choice. What bothered me with it, though, is that simultaneously Tris was dying for everyone.
I’m bothered with her death not *just* bc she died, but *how* she died… I realized as I read Roth’s own blogpost on the topic that Tris’ survival was totally possible: serums don’t work on Tris unless she WANTS them to in some way. So, it was set up so that by being rightly motivated — with no desire to just die– but to sacrifice purely for love, she could and did survive. She remembered when everyoje forgot. … and then, after surviving incredible odds, she died. Simple gunshot wound. At the hands of the political head, hoping she’s “done enough” to merit some kind of Heaven? Not exactly a hopeful message. And YA dystopian lit is at it’s core about hope. As readers we are supposed to journey with Tris and when she dies so abruptly, so needlessly & finally, we die, too. Thence the fan backlash, I think.
(Maybe she means “done enough” as in “lived out my full days ordained for me,” not “merited enough for my good to outweigh my bad.” which we Christians know can NEVER happen)
Anyway the soul craves resurretion. And there is none here. Not even a child surviving his mother or a younger sibling. There’s just a boyfriend and an older brother– both of whom should have been protecting, not protected.
The casual allowance for homosexual relationships without any negative comment (since the point of sexual/romantic relationships isn’t just proctreation, who cares, in Tris’ mind) as well as the indication that Tris & Tobias did finally sleep together outside the confines of any sort of marriage also bother me, especially coming from a “Christian” author.