Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Divergent, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Identity, Choice, and Divergence
Strength, Selfishness, and Selflessness
Competition, Groups, and Rivalries
Fear, Bravery, and Maturity
Women and Sexuality
Summary
Analysis
Tris is running away from her mother’s body, pursued by three Dauntless soldiers. Furious, Tris fire behind her as she runs away—she wants to avenge the death of her mother. She manages to outrun her pursuers. Suddenly, Tris sees Will—a zombie—in front of her. She raises her gun and shoots Will in the head, killing him.
Tris has previously expressed a reluctance to hurt or kill other people. Here, however, she makes the questionable decision to actually kill Will—who was previously a friend of hers—in order to save others.
Themes
Tris manages to make it to her family’s hiding place, as Natalie has directed her. Inside the hiding place, she finds Caleb and Andrew, along with a few other Abnegation people, including Marcus. Caleb notices that Tris is bleeding from her shoulder, and he takes her inside to care for her wound. Tris tells her father, “I’m factionless now,” but her father replies that Tris is “with us.”
Tris tells her family that they need to “wake up” the Dauntless soldiers immediately. They can do this by accessing the computers that control the serum in the Dauntless soldiers’ brains. Marcus laments the horrible situation, but Tris senses that his sorrow is only for show. The mind-control computers, Tris guesses, are probably located in the Dauntless headquarters. Tris tells her father that she’ll need help to break into headquarters: anyone who can fire a gun and isn’t afraid of heights.
Tris demonstrates further intelligence by forming a coherent plan for how to defeat the governments of Dauntless and Erudite as quickly as possible. She also has her first real interactions with Marcus here—a man she suspects of being a child molester (hence Tobias’s fear of his father).
Themes
