Divergent Thinking (17 page)
Read Divergent Thinking Online
Authors: Leah Wilson
“Becoming fearless isn't the point. That's impossible. It's learning how to control your fear, and how to be free from it, that's the point.”
âTobias,
Divergent
F
EAR AND THE
D
AUNTLESS
B
OY
More than any other character in the book, Tobias is identified with and by his fears. He is called “Four” because he has only four fears. It is through his instruction of Tris and the other initiates that we learn how the fear landscapes work and what their role is in Dauntless training.
Let's take a walk though his fear landscape and look at each of his fears in light of what we know about how fear happens and why we fear the things we do.
We learn about his first fear, the fear of heights, even before his and Tris' visit to the simulation. When Tris climbs up the Ferris wheel during the capture-the-flag exercise, she guesses the truth when she sees how he behaves. When Tris asks about it, Four replies, “I ignore my fear.” When presented with a height-related challenge in his fear landscape, Tobias leaps, demonstrating his ability to do just that. Stepping from the top of the Ferris wheel would have been a terrible plan, but in the simulated fear landscape, it's a smart move, since the goal is to ignore the fear, to neutralize it. Through his repeated visits to his fear landscape, it seems that Tobias has learned how to persevere despite his fear.
Confinementâclaustrophobic confinementâis the second of the fears he confronts in his landscape. Claustrophobia is one of the many manifestations of the fear of smothering. Like the fear of heights, this fear is common enough to qualify as a “preset,” but the fear in this case is compounded, made worse by his experiences as a child. His father used confinement in a closet as a punishment. That trauma amplifies the natural fear. One result is that this fear is more difficult to overcome. I have no idea how he usually solves this problem, but in this case, he is distracted and amused by Tris. It is only when he laughs out loud that this part of the trial ends.
Next is the situation where an armed woman presents a threat, but the apparent potential danger is not the fear at work. The challenge for Tobias is to pick up the gun and use it. He isn't in a panic, but he dreads this act. (What is the difference between dread and panic? Dread happens when there is time to think. It is what Tobias is forced to experience as he lifts the gun, loads the single bullet, and pulls the trigger.) In this scenario Tobias confronts his own capacity for violence. Killing the woman, coldly and methodically, is the only way forward. There is something both brutal and banal about this act, one Tris imagines him having committed within the fear landscape a thousand times before. She even observes that Tobias accomplishes this step without much difficulty, but she may be underestimating the toll this deliberate killing takes on him. The worst possible outcome, and the fear he faces here, may be the day this part of the scenario no longer elicits an emotional response like fearâwhen it no longer “feels real.”
The next fear that he faces is his own father, Marcus, who abused Tobias repeatedly as a child. The scars of that sort of abuse run deeper than the marks left behind by the belt. Even now, when Tobias is an adult capable of fighting back, he cringes, defenseless against his abuser. The engine of the imagination has taken this traumatic memory and fused it with other fears: there are many Marcusesâa swarm of Marcusesâand the belts they carry slither like snakes.
As we learn in
Allegiant,
the fear landscape is always in flux. After Tobias faces and physically defeats Marcus in the real world, his fears change. Heights and smothering confinement still make an appearance, but he makes short work of them. That is when a new and horrible fear reveals itself. He is no longer afraid of suffering punishing abuse; he is afraid of the threat Marcus poses to his character, future, and identity. He is no longer afraid of Marcus the abuser, he is afraid of becoming that abuser. Tobias is afraid he will become like Marcus. It is a legitimate fear. One of the tragedies of child abuse is that those who experience or witness abuse are more likely to become abusers. This makes a certain sad sense when we think of the ways we learn as infants and children, of the mirror neurons in the brain, and how we imitate others. It is very difficult for Tobias to shake off that fear, to reclaim his own identity.
The final fear that Tobias faces is the fear of losing Tris.
When he leaves his fear landscape after he experiences the horrible grief of being unable to save her, he resolves not to use the simulation again. He doesn't need to relive his fears; he needs to overcome them in the real world. Because it is there, moment by moment, that he risks loving Tris. It is there, moment by moment, that Four becomes Tobias, no longer defined by his fears.
      Â
Blythe Woolston
would aspire to Erudite, fail catastrophically, and end up among the factionless. She is the author of
Black Helicopters,
a novel about a young suicide terrorist.
Her earlier books,
The Freak Observer
and
Catch & Release,
reflect her interest in science. Her next book is full of imaginary monsters, because she needed a little vacation from the terrors of the real world, and wriggling tentacles are a pleasant change. She lives in Montana.
________________
1
Association for Psychological Science. “Evolution of Aversion: Why Even Children Are Fearful of Snakes.”
Science Daily,
28 Feb. 2008. Accessed 11 Nov. 2013. <
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080227121840.htm
>.
2
Quan Van Le et al., “Pulvar Neurons Reveal Neurobiological Evidence of Past Selection for Rapid Detection of Snakes,”
PNAS
(Oct. 28, 2013).
3
I'm mildly alektorophobic myself. I had a bad experience with a flock of fowl when I was very small, and I never quite got over it. Imagine my fear landscape, where giant
chickens
roamâit's okay to laugh.
4
Darwin, Charles.
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1899.
5
You actually have two amygdalae, one in each hemisphere of your brain. It's just easier to talk about one of them. In addition to the role it plays in fear, the amygdala is also involved in other emotions, memory learning and communication. Amygdala: tiny but very influential.
6
During observation of a rat brain, the travel time was clocked at twelve milliseconds (.012 seconds).
7
Ms. Roth sought therapy for her GAD years after she wrote
Divergent.
She shared her experience on this blog: Granger, John. “10 Questions with Veronica Roth, Author of the Divergent Trilogy, Part 3.”
The Hogwarts Professor.
6 March 2013. <
http://www.hogwartsprofessor.com/10-questions-with-veronica-roth-author-of-the-divergent-trilogy-part-3-did-you-plan-these-books-no-really/
>.
8
According to Jeanine's logic, the abundance of mirror neurons in Tris' brain indicates that she is untrustworthy and a danger to others. Her mirror neurons make it easier for her to imitate others, to be deceptive, to be a spy. Unsurprisingly, Jeanine's is a distorted perspective.
9
Jennifer N. Gutsell and Michael Inzlicht, “Empathy Constrained: Prejudice Predicts Reduced Mental Simulation of Actions during Observation of Outgroups
,”
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
(Sep. 2010).
10
Dias, B.G. and K.J. Ressler. “Presentation Abstract: âInfluencingbehavior and neuroanatomy in the mammalian nervous system via ancestral experiences.'” Neuroscience 2013.12 Nov. 2013. <
http://www.abstractonline.com/plan/ViewAbstract.aspx?mID=3236&sKey=b8777f87-e87b-48ce-b047-9e2b36b833dc&cKey=b4c82dcd-2a7d-4393-b8bc-661cde6c2678&mKey=8d2a5bec-48254cd6-9439-b42bbl51dlcf
>.
11
C. W Lueders, “Voluntary Control of the Heart Rate through Respiration,”
JAMA
79 (1922).
12
The fear of needles and injections is fairly common, but not in future Chicago, judging by the abundance of hypodermics and, in Dauntless, tattoos.
13
M. Szyf, I. Weaver, and M. Meaney, “Maternal Care, the Epigenome and Phenotypic Differences in Behavior,”
Reproductive Toxicology
(2007).
14
Erica J. Young et al., “Selective, Retrieval-Independent Disruption of Methamphetamine-Associated Memory by Actin Depolymerization,”
Biological Psychiatry
(2013).
      Â
If I had to sum up the Divergent trilogy in a single word (and, okay, if both
choice
and
sacrifice
were taken), I'd pick
family.
Family and its attendant baggage are what drive most of Tris' and Tobias' decisions, whether we're talking Tris' commitment to protecting the information her parents died for or Tobias' fear of his father. Mary Borsel-lino delves further into the role of family, both in Tris' and Tobias' stories and in the series as a whole.
Family in the Divergent Trilogy
M
ARY
B
ORSELLINO
The journey from childhood
to adulthood is one that, by its very nature, requires us to leave behind the child versions of ourselves. This means that, in order to discover who we are and what our personal moral stances on the issues in our lives entails, we have to go through a process of rejecting our parents. It's normal, it's healthy, and it can be very frightening.
The Divergent novels tap into this fear, not only in the obvious ways, but also through the use of the archetypal Hero's Journey. In its most basic form, the hero's journey is this: a hero sets out on a quest to get something needed at home, accomplishes the quest and gets the prize, and then returns home with the prize in order to provide the help needed there. If you interpret the “prize” of the Divergent novels to be mature self-discovery, then it becomes clear that Tris is on this very same kind of journey throughout the series.
Because of the trilogy's structure, with each novel offering new layers of revelation about the true nature of society, it's not obvious at the outset of
Divergent
exactly what it is that is needed in the societyâwhat it is that Tris must venture out and return with. Nevertheless, her story starts the way the hero's journey does: she leaves behind the family and life she's known. Over the course of the three books, she tries on different versions of herself, maturing and changing as life teaches her more lessons. Then, knowing herself and who she is, Tris returns “home” to the values that her parents taught her and leans on those values to find the strength and selflessness she needs to sacrifice herself for the future of those she cares about.
Even outside of the kind of life-and-death adventures found in fiction, this journeyârejecting your role as your parents' dependent child, discovering who you are apart from them, and then ultimately coming back to forge a new adult bond with themâis a huge part of what it means to grow up. As Tris and Tobias both discover, it's only once you know who you are outside of the context of your childhood family unit that you can come to know and understand your parents on equal footing.
It isn't until she's stopped living with her parents and being dependent on them that Tris learns anything about who Andrew and Natalie are as people, beyond their roles in her life as her father and mother. The further away Tris moves from childhood, the more complex her understanding of Natalie in particular becomes.
Adulthood is a role taken up at age sixteen in the faction system, when everyone has to choose which faction they belong in. For Tris, choosing to remain in Abnegation would still be a choice and would involve becoming an adult in the eyes of her parentsâshe imagines being able to talk to them at the dinner table, something she was never supposed to do as a child.
