Lena Haloway In Delirium By Lauren Oliver

In the novel Delirium, by Lauren Oliver, there are many great characters that contribute majorly to the story. The narrator of the story, a dynamic character, is Lena Haloway and she is also the main protagonist of the novel. Her full name is Magdalena Ella Haloway Tiddle, she is seventeen years old, and she describes herself as an average looking girl. Living in a society where everyone is controlled, Lena grows up as a girl who is afraid of everything not normal. The normal in her world is that love is forbidden and it is dangerous. She also highly believes in security being that she states that “The definition of happiness is security.”(Oliver 164). But, she eventually realizes the lies of her society and ends up falling in love. In the
beggining of the story, Lena does everything she is supposed to by following all the rules of the society. Forced by the society, like everyone else, Lena is afraid of catching the disease of amor deliria nervosa, which is the disease of love. Unfortunately, according to Lena, her mother passed away from the symptoms of the illness. Soon, Lena meets a boy, Alex who she fearfully ends up falling in love with. Although she stops following the society, she changes in a negative way during the story. One part of it being that her selfishness reaches another level, and not in a good way. Lena steals from the grocery store of her uncle, she forced her co-workers to change her shifts so she could be with Alex, and she stops caring about her best friend, Hana. She even talks about Hana, saying that, “ Maybe it’s selfish, but at that moment, I can’t even feel sorry for her, or the trouble I’ve caused”(Oliver 321) To sum up, Lena was an innocent girl who was trapped willfully in society and when she stopped following the norms and fell in love, she became a different, more selfish person. So, perhaps, she did fall ill to amor deliria nervosa.