Chapters Thirty-Seven Through Thirty-Nine

Yes! As I stated in a previous post, I knew that Tris had a tattoo on her left shoulder! I wasn't sure what it would turn out to be, but I am glad it was representative of her other home faction, Dauntless. Tris is acting with both Dauntless and Abnegation oriented responses by attacking the Dauntless compound head on, as it takes bravery to risk ones life to end a violent pogrom against the Abnegation and Divergent.

Something about Marcus is just not right. I don't think it's merely a figment of Tris's imagination anymore, but the way his eyes are described as "cold" foreshadows something dark, in my interpretation. The way he says that Peter's pain is for the good was quite reminiscent to his beatings of Tobias. Speaking of violence, Tris's father had an interesting reaction to it. "There is a right way to do things", he persuades. In this case it is hard to decide what is the best to do. If he isn't comfortable with the violence, then he probably shouldn't have come. I personally would have avoided the violence, seeing it as a lost and impossible cause. I'm not sure whether it is myself that leads me to believe that, or the very fact that I was placed in Amity that provoked that feeling.

In an eerie way, I somewhat foresaw either Tris or Tobias dying, and now here we are. They are beating each other senseless, and there seems to be no end in sight. Sometimes love and hate become so intertwined with one another in some ways, that it is hard to distinguish. Both can involve deep passion and obsession, and can appear within someone in an instant. I doubt that Roth will allow for one of the two to die, after Tris has already lost her parents. Perhaps this is the imperfection in the serum-- perhaps Tobias will not be able to kill her because he will falter on the distinction between love and hate.

One of Tris's statements that really gets at me is "can I be forgiven for all I've done to get here?" I feel as if Tris does not only mean to reference a higher power, but she also is asking whether or not her father will forgive her for how she had trodden over his beliefs and everything that he taught her. Maybe she even is asking if those that she hurt could ever forgive her for the pain she inflicted upon them. All of this is very eluding to the major themes surfacing in The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne. The thoughts of death, redemption, and forgiveness are quite relevant in this chapter particularly, and I wonder if Tris will ever be able to forgive herself for the way that her mother and father died before her eyes, Just as Hester never could truly forgive herself for her sin.

I'm not really sure where to go from here now that I've reached the final chapter. It's hard to speculate on what Tris's future will be like, not knowing whether Christina, Max, Jeanine, Uriah, or any of the others are still living. I'm surprised that Tris isn't overwhelmed with emotion by the death of her parents, but I suppose it could be shock. Her parents, however, were not the same people she once knew. Her mother in Abnegation form had died long ago, and Tris never got to know the Dauntless side of her mother. I feel like Tris is devastated by her father's death, but treats her mother's death as if she were a child who lost her mother in infancy, left with many questions as to who she actually was.

As for the new antagonist villains of the story, I feel like Marcus is going to be not to terrible helpful or pleasant. The way Tris snapped at him forebodes a bitter unhappy ending for marcus in my mind. I also just noticed something very, very profound. A vast number of the fears that Tris was forced to endure in her fear landscape actually came to haunt her in real life. She was trapped in the tank, Tobias scared her, she was almost forced to shoot someone whom she loved, and in a way she was abducted by the Erudite leaders. I think that that has some very important meaning, and that it should be kept in mind.

Finally, Tris is left to the world with "no path, no home, and no certainty." Within a mere few days, she has been forced to become a gypsy, traveling on without knowledge of what will happen to her. Isn't this what being Divergent is about, though? As Tris's mother said, the Divergent brain goes in a dozen directions at once, and will not bind itself to any one life. I suppose then that Tris and Tobias were meant to make it out of this alive together, so that they may roam freely just as the Divergent are meant to. Perhaps now they have freed their Divergent souls from the bondage of the factions.