A Comprehensive Analysis of Literary Protagonists - Sykalo Evgen 2023

Will - “Divergent trilogy” by Veronica Roth

I didn’t want to like Divergent. It came out during that black hole of YA dystopia saturation—remember those years? Everyone had a test, a faction, a color-coded rebellion, a stupidly hot brooding love interest with a mysterious scar. (Hunger Games walked so Divergent, Maze Runner, Matched, Delirium, and the rest could run laps in combat boots across scorched earth.) But Divergent stuck. Not just because it made a whole generation briefly obsessed with choosing their personality type like it was Hogwarts 2.0, but because—unlike the others—it kept spiraling inward, until what started as dystopia ended up being a pretty intimate little postmodern thesis on grief, choice, and (ugh) will.

Yes, will. The least sexy, most exhausting word in the English language. Not desire, not fate, not instinct or rebellion. Will. Like, the stubborn, personal, boring thing you have to summon when you’re standing at a metaphorical edge of something and the plot twist is: no one’s going to push you.

Veronica Roth didn’t invent the genre, obviously. But there’s something slightly unhinged and kind of brilliant about what she did with it. And the fact that she got so much flack for that finale (we’ll get to it) proves she was onto something big, raw, and disobedient—especially for YA, which usually prefers a nice kiss and a revolution checklist.

Choosing a faction is choosing a self—and no, that’s not just a metaphor.

Let’s just get the mechanical stuff out of the way. The world of Divergent is this slickly sliced-up future Chicago where everyone has to pick a “faction” at sixteen: Abnegation (altruists), Dauntless (adrenaline junkie anarcho-goths), Erudite (nerds with villain potential), Amity (hippies who got lost on their way to a Fleet Foxes concert), and Candor (walking Twitter arguments in human form). The premise is clean, a little fascist, and very BuzzFeed quiz.

But here’s what hits harder: the system doesn’t just tell you where to belong. It tells you what kind of narrative you’re allowed to live.

Choose Dauntless and you get the hot rebel storyline—pain, fire, a leather jacket. Choose Erudite and you’re either a savior with glasses or a villain with a superiority complex. Choose Abnegation and you get erased from your own plot, which is maybe the point.

So when Tris (our girl, our narrator, our vehicle of agonizing self-awareness) chooses Dauntless instead of staying safe in her gray little Abnegation box, it’s not brave in the way the book says it is. It’s desperate. It’s teenage. It’s one long scream: I want to be in the story.

And that’s what makes the first book sing. Not the plot (which moves fast and breaks everything), not the love interest (Four is hot but aggressively nondescript), but this creeping, gut-level fear that maybe the system was right. Maybe we do need to sort people, if only to give shape to the chaos of being alive.

Because that’s the secret. The factions don’t fail because they’re broken. They fail because they almost work.

“Divergence” is the word we gave to people who don’t fit, but it might as well be code for “main character energy.”

Everyone remembers the Big Reveal: Tris is Divergent. Which basically means she tests as more than one faction and the system can’t control her. Cool, right? Chosen one, glitch in the matrix, all that jazz.

Except the more you think about it, the more you realize how sad it is. Divergence isn’t a superpower. It’s an error. A label invented by a system that literally cannot handle nuance.

And that’s what Roth does that’s lowkey genius. She tricks you into rooting for divergence the way you’d root for being “not like other girls,” only to show you the slow, creeping cost of it. You don’t belong anywhere. You’re too much. You’re a threat. And that’s not just a world problem—it’s a self problem.

What happens when your interiority can’t be coded into one storyline?

What happens when you still can’t save everyone?

And then: what happens when the entire world you were told to save turns out to be a decoy?

The plot twist isn’t that the system is fake—it’s that the self might be.

Let’s talk about Allegiant, aka the third book, aka the one that got absolutely dragged. (No thanks to the movie, which aged like milk in a microwave.)

Everyone wanted another revolution, a takedown, a clean answer. Instead, Roth yanks back the curtain and shows us: the faction system was an experiment. The city was a lab. People are just test subjects in some government program to “heal” genetic damage.

And I get it. That reveal feels cold. Clinical. Like someone cut the wires on your emotional investment and told you your trauma was part of a spreadsheet. But that’s kind of the point?

The world was fake. The identity crisis wasn’t just Tris’s—it was structural. The story we were sold is itself a manipulation. You thought you were the resistance, turns out you’re part of someone else’s glitchy software update. Ouch.

That’s real dystopia, by the way. Not totalitarianism, but bureaucratic dehumanization so vast and banal it doesn’t even bother to lie convincingly.

And Tris? She doesn’t rage. She doesn’t flip the table. She makes a choice.

Will, again. Ugh. It’s not sexy but it’s everything.

I lied earlier when I said will was boring. It’s actually kind of terrifying, in the context of this story. Because if fate is fake and the system is fake and your personality quiz result is fake, then all you’ve got left is what you decide.

Roth makes you sit in that uncertainty. And then she goes full scorched-earth with it.

Tris chooses to die. Not in a self-sacrificial girlboss martyr way. Not even in a noble, redemptive arc. She does it because she believes it’s the best move in a game that stopped making sense three plot twists ago. And if you think that’s anticlimactic, maybe you haven’t been paying attention.

Tris isn’t a hero. She’s a person trying to hold a center that keeps dissolving. Her death hurts because it refuses the fantasy of narrative justice. (That’s why people hated it, if we’re honest.) There’s no “getting what she deserves.” She dies because she chooses to, because the world is broken and messy and being the main character doesn’t come with plot armor.

Honestly? That’s the most honest thing a YA book has ever done.

You want a clean ending? Read something else.

There’s no real closure in Allegiant. There’s a lot of walking. A lot of mourning. Tobias (aka Four aka We Get It, You’re Sad) does the only thing anyone can do after losing someone whose story doesn’t end cleanly: he keeps going.

And again, this isn’t prestige-TV grief, where you cry in a tasteful montage and then level up. It’s stupid grief. Mundane, shapeless, rude. Tobias makes mistakes. He forgets what she sounded like. He doesn’t become a better person. He survives.

In a way, Roth’s most radical act wasn’t killing her protagonist. It was refusing to turn that death into meaning.

Why we keep coming back to it—even if we think we’re over it.

Look. You probably read Divergent when you were, what, thirteen? Fourteen? You maybe devoured it in two days and thought, “Wow, I wish I could jump off a train and be special.” But the older you get, the more that fantasy sours into something… heavier.

Not because you stopped wanting to be chosen. But because you realized the choosing never ends.

The book’s not really about a system falling apart. It’s about a person realizing that no system can make her feel real. And the trilogy gets bleaker as it goes, not because it runs out of ideas, but because Roth refuses to lie to her readers the way every other YA dystopia does.

There’s no perfect world at the end. Just people, messy and compromised, trying to will something good into being.

Final thoughts, but not a conclusion. (We don’t do that here.)

It’s tempting to dunk on Divergent. It’s slick, it’s mainstream, it gave us Shailene Woodley doing slow-motion fight scenes in zip-up vests. But if you reread it now—like, really sit with it—it’s weirdly… philosophical? Not in a pretentious way. In a “wow, this book just gave me an existential identity crisis and now I need to lie down” way.

Veronica Roth had the audacity to write a story where being special is a problem. Where love doesn’t save you. Where selfhood is a knife that keeps cutting both ways. That’s not just YA. That’s straight-up Camus in combat boots.

So yeah. I still think about Tris. Not because she was the coolest or the most powerful or even the most likable. But because she looked at a collapsing world and decided to be a person anyway.

Will is hard. That’s the whole point.