A Long Way Gone: Text to Society Connection

     In the novel, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, a child by the name of Ishmael Beah is forced to flee his home town of Mogbwemo as rebel soldiers decimate towns all over Sierra Leone. Ishmael eventually becomes an unwilling boy soldier, After his village in Sierra Leone is attacked, Ishmael and his brothers go wandering from village to village in search of food but eventually are found and forced to become soldiers in the child army. They become ruthless killing machines and adapt an addiction to various drugs. Eventually Ishmael's Lieutenant in the child army turns them over to UNICEF, a program which was currently focusing on restoring child soldier's lives to normal as best as possible, and they go to America for their rehabilitation process.

View the following link for a complete summary of the novel and an autobiography of Ishmael Beah:
                                             http://www.alongwaygone.com/index.html

     But more importantly, we will analyze how the central idea of persevering to overcome struggles and how it played a part in both A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier and our current day society. In the novel A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah, this idea is everpresent supported by the following quote from page 146, " We flipped the bodies over and took their ammunition and guns. I was not afraid of these lifeless bodies. I despised them and kicked them to flip them" (Beah 146). This quote depicts Ishmael's loss of his humanity in the sense that after joining the child army he was brainwashed into not having any compassion for anyone, and therefore didn't regard the death of a human, of much importance.

     Similarly in an Article by the Chicago Tribune titled: With perseverance, Haitian immigrant's dream comes true, it tells of a Haitian boy who moved to the United States by knew no English. Initially he had no means of communicating with anyone but his sister so he had to work jobs that required intense manual labor. However that all changed quickly for Jude Registre. He went to school and learned English. Now he is a junior in college aspiring to become a bio-medical engineer or doctor. He too had persevere to overcome the struggle of not being able to communicate with others but after he did so his life changed for the better and he became a normal American citizen.
                                            View the following link for the complete article:
      http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2003-12-19/news/0312190360_1_haitian-immigrant-english

Blog Post #3: About the Author: Veronica Roth

     I just began reading Allegiant by Veronica Roth, the third novel in the Divergent series consisting of the novels Divergent, Insurgent and Allegiant. For those of you who have been following my posts (2 posts so far), you may have noticed that I skipped the novel Insurgent, due to the fact that of the entire Divergent series, it was the most uneventful novel. The focus of my blog-post this week will be about the author,Veronica Roth, in order to convey to my audience the authenticity and professionalism of the author of a world renown and New York Times best selling series.

     The youngest of three children, Veronica Roth was born in New York but soon moved to Barrington, Illinois after her parents divorced when she as five. After graduating from Barrington High School, she enrolled in Carleton College in Minnesota. However, after one year at Carleton, she transferred to Northwestern University in Illinois and graduated with a degree in creative writing. Divergent was her debut novel, written during winter break of her senior year at Northwestern and published in 2011. Divergent is the first book in her acclaimed Young Adult series, followed by the sequels Insurgent (2012) and Allegiant (2013). In late 2013, Roth announced that she will publish a collection of four short stories from the point of view of Tobias Eaton, the second major character in Divergent trilogy.

Roth's Newest Sub-series from the perspective of Tobias Eaton (Four)

   Most importantly people wonder how Roth ever arrived upon this idea. In an one on one interview published in the back of Divergent,  Roth revealed how she came upon the idea that she based Divergent off of. "On a long drive from her home near Chicago to Carleton College in Minnesota—which she attended as a freshman before transferring to Northwestern—Veronica Roth saw on a billboard an image of a person leaping off a building. 'I wondered why someone would do that,' she recalls. 'At the time, I was also taking Intro to Psych and we were studying the treatment of phobias by repeated exposure to fears'"(Roth 574). To furthur elaborate on this idea Roth has made a tangent series in which she will describe the novel from the Prespective of Tobias Eaton (Four).

Blog Post #2: Dynamic Character Analysis on Divergent

     It has been a mere two weeks since my first blog post and since then I have leafed through and have now finished the novel Divergent. As I had said in my previous blog: Veronica Roth is a New York Times Bestselling author for this Divergent Trilogy itself. As you can see from my widgets, I am an avid reader and have pored through just about every acclaimed fictional novel written over the past 3 years. When I say that Divergent is one of the most dynamically crafted and engaging books I have ever read, you can most definitely take my word for this. The main aspects that I will be analyzing in this specific blog post is the dynamic character(s) Beatrice Prior known as Tris.
   
     Beatrice "Tris" Prior was a former member of Abnegation , a faction which valued simplicity and selflessness above all other qualities. By the end of the book she transformed into a devout member of Dauntless, a faction laced with complexion and which valued self-preservation above all else. This drastic changing of factions was, in my opinion, a brilliant move by the author to show that Beatrice Prior was morphing and the resulting character would be a completely different person, one who was far more developed and would therefore be enticing to follow throughout the novel.
   

     This quote is a a prime example of when a dynamic character's change manifests him/her physically, "Looking at myself now isn't like seeing myself for the first time; it's like seeing someone else for the first time" (Roth 87). Tris has gone from looking like a generic Abnegation member who disregards the importance of beauty to a Dauntless member who dresses to reflect their personality. By the end of the novel this has become Tris' mentality, compared to her mentality of selflessness."I wish I could say I feel guilty for what I did. I don't "(Roth 174). This is another quote that exemplifies Tris' drastic change of moral values from being harmless and merciful to a ruthless person who valued self preservation above all else.

     I hope that after providing textual evidence and supplementing an extensive summary of Beatrice "Tris" Prior's life prior to becoming a  becoming a Dauntless member, you are able to clearly see and understand how Beatrice "Tris" Prior was a dynamic character in the novel Divergent. That's all I have for the novel Divergent. Stay tuned for more blog posts about other books (perhaps a blog post on The Color of Water or 1984 by George Orwell blog post).

Check this link to view a superb article about identifying dynamic characters in a novel, identifying various different types of change and distinguishing between static and dynamic characters:
http://avajae.blogspot.com/2013/03/characters-static-or-dynamic.html

Setting Analysis on Divergent Blog Post #1

     Veronica Roth is best known for her revolutionary trilogy: The Divergent Trilogy, starting with her first book, Divergent. In this New York Times Bestselling trilogy Roth is able to develop and utilize a setting like very few authors of this genre ever before. The book is enticing and for those of you reading this, who haven't read this this a must read, so make sure you watch out for Veronica Roth and any and all of her dystopian literatureesque super novels. Now lets get back to the point: setting, its an unavoidable and crucial part of the story, at times in the novel it seems as if the setting itself is another antagonist all in itself. From the cascading falls of the Dauntless Headquarters to the  broken windows on multistory skyscrapers, every setting ominously reminds the reader of what once used to be a completely different, inefficient and far less restrictive system of government; the republic of the United States of America.
   
     Many years after a revolution changed destroyed our world as we know it forever, the survivors of our human civilization banded together in the year 2100 in the war torn city of Chicago, Illinois. They formed a seamlessly perfect system of government, composed of 5 separate groups known as factions: Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Euridite and Dauntless, each represents one important aspect of our human civilization: Selflessness, Kindness, Truthfulness, Knowledge and Fearlessness. As each member of each faction turns 16 they take a simulation test which determines which factions they chose and in that the main character, Tris, has qualities present for 3 out of the 5 factions, this makes her a Divergent, she ultimately decides to join the faction Dauntless.
 
   
 The main setting that Roth develops and centers the novel around is the Dauntless Headquarters where initiates who selected Dauntless as their factions during the Choosing Ceremony. As I previously explained Beatrice Prior chose Dauntless as her faction, and coincidentally the Dauntless Headquarters were portrayed as the most elusive and mysterious faction of them all, to a point where the Headquarters locations were completely unknown to all non-Dauntless faction members. This masterfully played set of details (portraying Dauntless Headquarters as mysterious) make the setting of the novel all the more enticing and anticipated, as the reader yearns to uncover the hidden secrets of the larger than life Dauntless Headquarters.

     My favorite paragraph from the entire novel thus far is one that describes the magnificence of the chasm located inside the Dauntless Headquarters, "As we approach the railing, I hear a roar-of water,fasting moving water, crashing against rocks. I look over the side. The floor drops off at a sharp angle, and several stories below us is a river. Gushing water strikes the wall beneath me and sprays upwards. To my left, the water is calmer, but to my right, it is white battling with rock." This paragraph is the essence of the novel's setting. There are multiple major turning points in the novel for Tris including: her friend Christina is forced to hang over the chasm for 5 minutes, her friend Al takes his own life by jumping off into the chasm, she has to fight to avoid being thrown off by her enemy initiates. The setting is used to build tension between characters and used to progress parts/events of the plot to become more dramatic and suspense. All in all the setting is- as I previously stated- almost like another main character in the novel.

This link provides an in-depth analysis of the significance of the time period and setting of the novel Divergent By Veronica Roth

http://www.shmoop.com/divergent/setting.html