Allegiant (Divergent, #3)

by Veronica Roth

Every question that can be answered must be answered or at least engaged. Illogical thought processes must be challenged when they arise. Wrong answers must be corrected. Correct answers must be affirmed.

Hello, and welcome to the 'Allegiant' support group, aka my 'Allegiant' Kindle annotations. (Not sure why you need a support group? Just trust me on this.) I love this epigraph. When I wrote this series, I was in my early twenties, working through some issues I had with the competitive academic environments that I had been a part of for most of my young adult life. As I wrote the books, I started to let some of those issues go, and warm toward Erudite as a collection of people who earnestly pursue knowledge and value curiosity—which I now think is one of the best qualities a person can possess. This epigraph is a reflection of that warmth. An Erudite doesn’t let you feed them meaningless nonsense. They are interested in facts, logic, and truth. The pursuit of truth is a big theme in this book, so the epigraph seemed fitting—and I’ve realized in the years since writing this that if we’re all Divergent (and I think we are), Erudite is one of the factions for which I have an aptitude. Has your perception of the factions changed over the course of this series, as you yourself have changed, even in a small way? Mine certainly has. (To also read Veronica Roth's insider notes on Divergent see https://www.goodreads.com/notes/3529578-veronica-roth?ref=knh)

I need to see what’s outside the fence.

Speaking of Erudite, this is Tris’s Erudite aptitude showing itself. She is desperate to understand, just as she was at the end of Insurgent—and willing to risk a whole lot to get that understanding.

I CAN’T WALK these hallways without remembering the days I spent as a prisoner here, barefoot, pain pulsing inside me every time I moved.

I wasn’t always set on writing in Tobias’s POV, and the reason I ultimately decided to do it is not what you might think, if you’ve already read the rest of Allegiant. The reason is because the world of the book had become a lot bigger than in the first two installments, and I wanted to show more than one view of it. Throughout the book, Tris occupies a more privileged position than Tobias, so she goes places that Tobias is unable—or unwilling—to go…and vice versa. He shows us parts of this world that we need to see. Because of this, Tris shows herself to be a more idealistic character than Tobias, partly because she just is, and partly because the people she encounters in Allegiant treat her more kindly than they do Tobias. We need them both to give us a complete picture. Tobias’s voice was difficult to nail down. He sounds a lot like Tris, which is partly because writing in a completely different voice was a challenge for me, and partly because he is a lot like Tris. They had the same upbringing, made the same faction choice, and are similarly straightforward in their communication. One thing I tried to do was to make Tobias’s voice more descriptive, bordering on poetic, at times. He has always had a softer side—softer than Tris, to be sure.

We are not people who touch each other carelessly; every point of contact between us feels important, a rush of energy and relief.

See? Abnegation can be romantic, too.

They call themselves the Allegiant.”

My original title for this book, once I decided they should all rhyme (don’t ask me why, it felt like a good idea at the time), was Emergent. And then I wrote it, and the word “Allegiant” came up instead. It’s also the name of an airline!

Her flare of anger sets me off. I say, “Don’t forget that I barely know you, Evelyn.”

One of the discussions I remember having while they were making the Insurgent movie was how to “age up” the dynamic between Evelyn and Tobias. In the movie, all the characters are a little older than in the book—the people who made the movie weren’t expecting anyone to believe that Theo James is eighteen and that Shailene Woodley is sixteen. As a result, the dynamic between Evelyn and Tobias that exists in the book doesn’t quite work for a grown man and his adult mother. Adult children of profoundly imperfect parents are certainly still affected by those parents, but they have also had more time to navigate life as independent adults. As a result, the Evelyn-Tobias relationship in the movie is more tense and bitter, and less raw and hot-headed.

“Chaos and destruction do tend to take away a person’s dating possibilities.”

I really wanted to give these two a moment of respite. They’ve sort of hurtled their way through the last two books without being able to enjoy each other’s company and act like regular teenagers. I’ve also always wanted to climb the sculpture they climb. Have you ever looked around at wherever you live and thought about what you would do if no one would stop you? When I was a kid I used to daydream about getting left in a mall overnight. Maybe that’s what Divergent is, only instead of the mall it’s Chicago.

A group of factionless has already gathered outside, in the middle of Michigan Avenue. A layer of pale clouds covers the sun, making the daylight hazy and dull. I hear someone shout, “Death to the factions!” and others pick up the phrase, turning it into a chant, until it fills my ears,

The song I was listening to when I wrote this scene was “Empty Gold” by Halsey.

The woman comes closer. She is statuesque and blond, like Jeanine. A pair of glasses dangles from her front pocket, and her hair is in a braid. An Erudite from head to foot, but not Jeanine Matthews. Cara.

Cara is one of my favorite secondary characters in Allegiant. In my next series, Carve the Mark, the character Teka is a (kind of intentional) Cara 2.0—smart, sharp, and unwilling to put up with other people’s nonsense. Good qualities in a friend.

I shout her name, and she coughs again, this time more blood. She screams for help, and I scream for her, and I don’t hear anything, I don’t feel anything, but my heartbeat, but my own terror.

I went back and forth, in this scene, with getting rid of one of Four’s fears. I don’t remember why—I think I wanted to show progress, but it didn’t ultimately feel realistic. Instead, I decided to show how his fears change shape as his life changes shape. His fear of his father shifts from a more basic, almost childlike fear of the man himself to the fear of what the man has made him, which feels more adult to me. And then, of course, there’s the fear of losing Tris. As I get older, I realize that the more I open myself up to in life, the more I have to lose. That’s where this comes from for Tobias—his life is richer because of Tris, and now there’s more at stake. Have your fears changed as you’ve gotten older?

“I didn’t know that idiocy caused people to just start spontaneously bleeding from the nose.”

LOVE YOU, ZEKE.

I wonder if fears ever really go away, or if they just lose their power over us.

Tori’s death, for me, was a shot of realism. Logistically speaking, there had to be a cost to this group of people risking life and limb to get out of the city—they build it up as this dangerous, desperate mission, so if it had been easy, if it had not cost anything, it would not feel so urgent, so important, so necessary that they get where they’re going. And the suddenness of her passing is another sad truth: you don’t always get the last moments you wish you’d had with someone. Just because you don’t get a chance to say goodbye doesn’t mean your love for someone isn’t felt by both of you. I wanted to include that kind of loss—that grief of an opportunity missed by just a hair—because I wanted to honor that feeling in real life. I’ve lost people I never got to say certain things to, and had to make peace with it. We all do. Timing isn’t usually in our favor. All we can do is make the most of our moments.

born. It takes several generations for any kind of genetic manipulation to manifest, but people were selected from the general population in large numbers, according to their backgrounds or behavior, and they were given the option to give a gift to our future generations, a genetic alteration that would make their descendants just a little bit better.”

I did some research on genetic engineering for this book, most notably on “knockout mice.” A lot of that information has since disappeared from my brain, but basically, knockout mice are genetically altered mice, in which a particular gene has been rendered inactive so that we can study them. The mice will also be given a “marker gene,” which might be a gene that produces an observable change—a change in color, for example—so that you can kind of trace the genetic alteration over time. (Disclaimer: I’m not a scientist, so I could be a. wrong or b. explaining this poorly!) In these books, Divergence is just a marker gene—something you can observe that tells you a different gene has been altered. I loved the idea of Divergence, something that feels so important in the first book, is actually just a sign of something else, and thus not an important identity at all. Because that’s what often what becoming an adult involves—letting go of the things you no longer want to or need to be, so that you can become something else. Tris “comes of age” by letting her Divergence go.

Whoever built this place must have loved light.

This is really only referring to one terminal of O’Hare airport (which I love for some reason, even though most people hate it there)—terminal 3, also known as the airport terminal the McCallisters run through to catch their flight in Home Alone 2. ICONIC.

The word “damaged” sinks inside me like it’s made of lead.

I made this choice for Tobias because I wanted to send him and Tris down different paths—one of them, to the highest levels of this stratified Bureau society, and the other, to its underground. “Damaged” and “not damaged” become almost like factions for these people. And for Tobias, this is basically a fear of his—the fear that his father has turned him into something he doesn’t want to be—come to fruition. Wrestling with what that means is an important part of his growth as a character in Allegiant.

I, Amanda Marie Ritter, of Peoria, Illinois, give my consent to the following procedures:

My husband is from Peoria.

His fingers slide into my hair, and I hold on to his arms to stay steady as we press together like two blades at a stalemate.

A nod to the proverb: “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.”

“Where have you been lately?” Christina says. She wiggles her eyebrows. “With Four? Doing a little . . . addition? Multiplication?”

This is my favorite joke in the entire series.

I used to think that when people fell in love, they just landed where they landed, and they had no choice in the matter afterward. And maybe that’s true of beginnings, but it’s not true of this, now. I fell in love with him. But I don’t just stay with him by default as if there’s no one else available to me. I stay with him because I choose to, every day that I wake up, every day that we fight or lie to each other or disappoint each other. I choose him over and over again, and he chooses me.

This is basically what I think about relationships. When people say commitment isn’t easy, they don’t just mean fighting over one person leaving all the drawers and cabinets open (that would be me, in my marriage)—they mean it really isn’t easy. But I didn’t really have an interest in making Tris and Four’s relationship the central conflict of any book. They make plenty of trouble for themselves, but it’s not usually with each other, at least not long-term. I like the contrast between their relative stability (not without conflict, but still: stability) and the instability of their worlds.

To me, when someone wrongs you, you both share the burden of that wrongdoing—the pain of it weighs on both of you. Forgiveness, then, means choosing to bear the full weight all by yourself.

This is a paraphrase of something that the pastor who conducted my wedding ceremony said once. It has stuck with me ever since. Forgiveness is deciding to bear weight. It’s not fair, and it’s not meant to be. It doesn’t mean forgetting what someone did to you; it means not making them carry it anymore. Thinking of it this way has helped me to work through some bitterness in my own life—for my own sake, as well as the other person’s—without feeling like I’m failing by still feeling hurt sometimes.

I love my brother. I love him, and he is quaking with terror at the thought of death. I love him and all I can think, all I can hear in my mind, are the words I said to him a few days ago: I would never deliver you to your own execution.

I get asked about this choice a lot. “Why did you make Tris do this? Caleb doesn’t deserve it!” is the general sentiment. This question is a little confusing to me. Whether he deserves it or not is not at all important here. This choice is not about Caleb. It’s about Tris. She does it because of who she is—because she is selfless, and brave, and because she has a deep capacity to forgive. She does it because she loves him despite what he’s done. This act doesn’t say anything in particular about Caleb. It says everything about her.

“Let them have the city and everything in it,” she says into my hair.

I always cry here, when I first wrote it and every time I’ve read it since then. I love this scene. Mother-child stuff always gets me. What makes you cry in books?

Can I be forgiven for all I’ve done to get here? I want to be. I can. I believe it.

This ending is controversial, and I always hesitate to discuss it because I have no interest in conditioning anyone’s responses to it—people are allowed and encouraged to react to books freely. But one question that often comes up is: did you know you were going to do this all along? So that’s what I’d like to talk about here. The short answer is: yes, I planned it from the beginning, so let’s look back at how I laid the groundwork. At the end of each book in the series, Tris faces her mortality. She engages with same ideas and questions each time. From Divergent, p476: Maybe it will be as easy to let him shoot me as it was in the fear landscape, as it is in my dreams. Maybe it will just be a bang, and the lights will lift, and I will find myself in another world. I stand still and wait. Can I be forgiven for all I’ve done to get here? I don’t know. I don’t know. Please. You can see her uncertainty here—this passage is full of “maybe,” “I don’t know,” “can I?” She has ideas about what death might mean, about what forgiveness and selflessness are. She’s essentially letting herself die because that’s the best way she can think of to go out, because she has been raised to believe self-sacrifice is powerful and has just encountered its power from both parents. But she isn’t sure of it. Near the end of Insurgent, we see her inching closer to certainty, picking up this train of thought again. From p379: I suppose that now would be the time to ask forgiveness for all the things I’ve done, but I’m sure my list would never be complete. I also don’t believe that whatever comes after life depends on my correctly reciting a list of my transgressions—that sounds too much like an Erudite afterlife to me, all accuracy and no feeling. I don’t believe that what comes after depends on anything I do at all. I am better off doing as Abnegation taught me: turning away from myself, projecting always outward, and hoping that in whatever is next, I will be better than I am now. She refers to asking for forgiveness, a call back to doing just that in the passage from Divergent. She expresses more certainty than before, too, as you can see with the repetition of “I don’t believe.” And she speculates that an “Abnegation death” is what’s best. But a few pages later… (p384, Insurgent): All those times Tobias scolded me for risking my life, I never took him seriously. I believed that I wanted to be with my parents and for all this to be over. I was sure I wanted to emulate their self-sacrifice. But no. No, no. Burning and boiling inside me is the desire to live. Tris’s realization that she wants to live is particularly significant here because she’s spent the whole book engaging in self destructive and impulsive behavior, an expression of her grief after her parents’ death. She realizes, in what she believes to be her final moments in Insurgent, that self-destruction is not the same as the sacrifice her parents’ made for her. She is again wrestling with what selflessness is, but this time she knows she doesn’t understand it; this time she knows she’s not ready for it. And that brings us here. She is no longer uncertain, as she was in Divergent—she knows what she believes. She is no longer self-destructive, as she was in Insurgent—she didn’t go into the room believing that it would kill her, she walked in believing she might live. She is no longer unwilling, as she was in both preceding volumes—she describes the feeling, a few lines before, as that of her mother drawing her close. This is a Tris who knows what she thinks, who knows who she is. Who makes a choice. I wasn’t committed to this ending until I was. I told myself, “well, write it, and see how you feel. You can always change it.” But when I wrote this scene, I knew I wouldn’t change my mind. I felt her make that choice. I trusted that feeling. And I didn’t take it back.

“Good-bye,” I say to him, and I mean it.

For this book (for the whole series, really) I researched the psychology of survivors of child abuse. One thing that came up a few times in my research was the idea of confronting the abuser or getting revenge or having some kind of cathartic resolution—and what people said, more than once, is that those things are just illusions, that there is no satisfying resolution other than walking away and leaving that person behind you. That’s why Tobias does this, and why we don’t hear much about Marcus again.

Her eyes were so stern, so insistent. Beautiful.

I didn’t really cry that much when I wrote her death. Her POV was so calm and accepting in that scene that it didn’t really hit me until later. But I cried a lot here.

There are so many ways to be brave in this world. Sometimes bravery involves laying down your life for something bigger than yourself, or for someone else. Sometimes it involves giving up everything you have ever known, or everyone you have ever loved, for the sake of something greater. But sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it is nothing more than gritting your teeth through pain, and the work of every day, the slow walk toward a better life.

I really love Christina—in general, and in this scene particularly. She is a good friend and a wise person. And I love this sentiment, too. Tobias’s big battle is over, for better or for worse, and what he does moving forward will be quieter and smaller than what he did before. But that doesn’t mean it’s any less important or brave. It just means there won’t be a book about it. :)

Since I was young, I have always known this: Life damages us, every one. We can’t escape that damage. But now, I am also learning this: We can be mended. We mend each other.

I know, I know. It’s still sad. But for someone like Tobias, who went a long time without trusting anyone and without forming meaningful connections, this is a particularly hopeful ending. He recognizes that he can’t go it alone. None of us can. Pain comes for all of us—we can’t escape or avoid it. But we can bear it, and endure it, especially if we have each other. Song for this last scene: “Rabbit Heart” by Florence + The Machine. Thank you for joining me. <4 If you would like to read more from Veronica Roth, see her newest book THE CHOSEN ONES here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40944762-chosen-ones?ref=knh