What Is Your Faction?

I woke up in a profoundly grumpy mood this morning.  Okay, to be fair, I don't ever wake up feeling sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows because I'm the antithesis of a morning person, but I usually do become friendlier after I've had time to gain consciousness.  This morning, though, my mood didn't improve as the morning wore on.  I have to admit that I sort of snapped at Claude when he suggested that it might do me good to get out for a little while. . . but then I asked myself, "What do you do when Claude is showing signs of the grumps?"  Answer?  I sweetly send him off to see a movie and eat wings or something.  Thus, I took him up on his offer and went to Augusta.

When I mentioned going to Masters (read: all tickets $2.50) to see a movie, he mentioned Mom's Night Out, but I opted instead for seeing Divergent for a third time.  (I'll save why I think I'm sort of avoiding Mom's Night Out for another blog.)  Why, you ask, do I keep going back to see this movie?  I think it's my fascination with a particular character. . . and the character isn't Tris Prior.  Tobias "Four" Eaton isn't necessarily that intriguing in the movie - and although there's nothing wrong with how Theo James looks per se, his receding hairline becomes more obvious to me every time I see Divergent - but I go in every time with my knowledge of the three books as well as the two short stories that have been released so far in mind as I watch.  Literary Tobias is, not surprisingly, far better developed than movie Tobias. . . and when I start delving into that character and what makes him tick, my literary/writer's brain gets a bit of a jump start.  And despite the fact that sales of my first book are sloooooooooooooooooow (which may or may not be one of the causes of my grumpiness, but I'll save that for another blog, too), I'm feverishly at work on a novel, which means that my literary brain needs all the help it can get.

However, as I leave the theater and go wherever I go afterward, I find myself pondering the whole question of factions.  For the Divergent-knowledge challenged, the society in which the characters live is divided into five factions: Abnegation (the selfless, vanity-shunning leaders of the government), Amity (the kind, happy workers of the land), Candor (the open, honest-to-a-fault leaders of the legal system), Dauntless (the brave, often reckless keepers of the peace), and Erudite (the intelligent, knowledge-thirsty controllers of all things intellectual).  A person ends up in a particular faction by choosing one at the age of sixteen, and that choice generally is based on a test that the person has take the previous day.  The idea is that the test should tell you the faction to which you are best suited. . . unless you're like Tris and are divergent (aka not strongly one particular thing).  In other words, it does systematically what society often does to us unintentionally.  (See Breakfast Club, The for a pretty good analysis of how this happens to teenagers all the time.)

So, I ask myself, if I lived in the Divergent world, where would I have ended up?  Of course, I'm pondering that question as my current self although I, too, would have taken the test at sixteen. . . the list of people who were around me all the time then and who are around me all the time now is pretty short (um. . . my mother, and that's about it), so you'll have to take my word for the fact that I'm a VERY different person now than I was about thirty-three years ago.  Still, though. . . even then, I wasn't selfless enough to be Abnegation, nice enough to be Amity, blunt enough (I am a Southerner, after all) to be Candor, or brave enough to Dauntless (heck, the mass transit system at UGA scared me).  And even though I was sort of stuck with the "brainy" tag back in those days, the Erudite of the Divergent world are on the whole very arrogant and condescending about their intellectual abilities - and I hate arrogance.  Maybe I would have just ended up factionless?  

In case you're wondering, I have taken a few quizzes on the subject.  On the one in the back of the book, I got one Amity answer and two each for Abnegation, Dauntless, and Erudite (which is almost identical to Tris's result. . . so maybe I'm divergent). . . on another, I got Amity. . . and on a "which character are you most like" quiz, I got Will, a nice Erudite who tranfers to Dauntless.  (Give or take that. . . well, I can't tell you that in case you haven't read the book or seen the movie, I was actually pretty good with that result because I do like Will.)  In the grand scheme of things, I'm no clearer on the answer than Tris was the day that she walked out of the test. . . only I don't have to slice my hand open tomorrow and bleed into a bowl.  (I can't explain everything to those who haven't read the book/seen the movie, so you'll just have to dig up the explanation for that comment on your own.)

I guess when it call comes down to it, I come full circle back to Tobias.  To know the whole story of his test results, you have to read the short story that tells you about his test and choice. . . but his results don't dictate who he is or ensure his satisfaction with the way he is wired.  As he tells Tris, "I don't want to be just one thing."  He wants to be kind AND smart AND brave AND honest AND selfless. . . and that's a worthy goal.  However, something I think that literary Tobias may get, at least to a point, that movie Tobias may not is that being those things requires more than our flawed human natures.  (Literary Tobias has the words "Fear God Alone" painted on the wall of his Dauntless living quarters.)  As we become more Christ-like, we should be in the process of becoming all of those things - and, as our pastor, David Lambert, pointed out in a sermon a few weeks ago, not deciding that we can't be because we're only human.  

We should all, in the best sense of the word, be divergent.