Divergent As A Dystopia Essay

A dystopia is an imagined world in which everything is unpleasant, which is typically an environmentally degraded society. Divergent, is a movie based off of the novel series Divergent which was published in 2012. The setting of the movie is based in Chicago at an unknown future date, and the main characters are Tris and Four. This movie is an example of a dystopia because the events are not real, and it is in an environmentally degraded society, where everyone believes that there was a war that destroyed all of mankind, and they were the only ones to proceed with human society. “They say the war was terrible, that the rest of the world was destroyed. Our founders built the wall to keep us safe, and they divided us into five groups, factions, to keep the peace” At the time of the publication, Chicago was under a strike consisting of teachers. According to wsws.org, “The 2012 strike by 29,000 Chicago teachers was betrayed by the leadership of the teachers union, which includes a prominent member of the ISO”. Along with the strike of
teachers, America was at war with Iran and Iraq, and the war was progressively getting worse. Iran was starting a nuclear program and was not going to discontinue the work done in the program. By writing this novel, the author pointed out that the world was going to go to war and by the end of it, the world was not going to be able to repair itself. In the novel, all of society is ruined, and only a few factions were left to fix mankind. To fix society, the government was split into factions, consisting of: Abnegation, the selfless, Amity, the peaceful, Candor, the honest, Dauntless, the brave, and Erudite, the intelligent, as well as the “factionless”, which have no purpose in society.
Because the divergent can think independently this group of people threaten the society they live in, so they hide in different factions pretending that they are something they aren’t. “The system removes the threat of anyone exercising their independent will. Divergents threaten that system. It won't be safe until they're removed.” Tris is a 16-year-old divergent girl, who in the beginning does not know what to choose when it comes to choosing her faction. Tris chooses Dauntless and begins her journey in finding who she is as a person, and in society. While she is in Dauntless, she falls in love with her leader named Four, and together they start a revolution in the
society. For the author, the events occurring in reality, like the strikes of teachers, betrayals, as well as war, drove her to write this thrilling novel, and with time became a number one selling movie in America. The message about the world that she tried to portray would be that humans cannot be controlled, betrayal in life happens, and that in government a human can not really trust anyone. The need for power and control occurs in every part of society, and although they can be split into factions, eventually they will be overturned by one dominant power. The point that the author tried to make is that in the end, by becoming who you are and not being labeled, a single person can help change the world. In conclusion, a dystopia is a society that is imagined, and is based in a world that is environmentally degraded. The novel as well as the movie Divergent is the epitome of what a dystopia would be like if it was based in present-day America.