Allegiant (Divergent, #3)

by Veronica Roth

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.