When
people think about character archetypes and science fiction books people tend
to think about The Hero. But it is not only and always about the hero, it is
also about many other kinds of character archetypes. In the book Divergent
by Veronica Roth there are many hidden as well as exposed character archetypes
that are important to identify to better understand the book. This is a book
about a girl named Tris who lives in this futuristic dystopian like world where
there is this large city that is divided into factions and that no one can
leave. Each faction believes in a specific virtue: candor, abnegation, erudite,
amity, and dauntless, and the protagonist Tris after being told that she is
divergent, is more than one virtue, must choose which faction she wants to
join.
In
this book Tris is the heroine who has to go through an initiation and must
complete the quest to bring back peace and order to the city. In her initiation
Tris crosses a threshold into a new much more dangerous world where she has to
go through the dauntless initiation so that she can become a member of the
dauntless. During this initiation Tris becomes much more mature and dependent
and is little by little starting to discover a secret about the dauntless and
erudite. The secret is that the erudite developed a serum that they injected
into all the dauntless, except the dauntless leaders, to mind control them into
following the erudite command. Because Tris and her mentor and boyfriend Four
or Tobias are divergent the serum does not affect them so they must go on a
quest to save the city. Also another very important figure to Tris is Tris’s
mom, who in the book is the mother figure because she helps direct Tris, give
her guidance and love. Other important figures in the book are Peter who is the
shadow and Christina who is trickster.
To
sum everything up, Divergent is a very interesting book that has many
different character archetypes that are in some cases easy and in other cases
hard to identify. I thought this was a great book and I am sure that I will go
on to read the next books in the series.
