Tally wastes no time in sharing with the reader that she wants so badly to become pretty because of a blood pact she made with her best friend, Peris. At some point when they were kids, they vowed to always stick by each other and become pretty together—they have matching, self-inflicted scars on their palms to remind them of this. However, Tally’s thinking about her loyalty to Peris (and about becoming pretty in general) begins to change when she meets a new friend, Shay, who doesn’t want to undergo pretty surgery at all. As Tally’s loyalties gradually shift, the novel overwhelmingly suggests that in order to be properly and effectively loyal to a person, one must dedicate themselves to helping their friends become the person they want to be—not who others deem they should be.
At first, Tally believes that her pact with Peris will help them both be the people they’re supposed to be (indeed, they both use almost that exact language to talk about becoming pretty). Pretty is, as far as they’re concerned, not just their only choice—it’s an inarguably positive thing. Tally’s belief in this is so strong that when she does become friends with Shay, she ignores clear signals that Shay isn’t entirely sold on being pretty. When they make morphos (digital models of what they’ll look like after the pretty operation) of Shay together, Shay is clearly disturbed by her hypothetical face’s perfect symmetry, high cheekbones, and big eyes. Instead, she suggests that she’d rather have an asymmetrical face and look unique, rather than like every other pretty. At this point in the novel, Shay believes it’s her job to convince Shay that she’s wrong about becoming pretty so that she, Shay, and Peris can all party together and be who they’re supposed to be in New Pretty Town. This is also one of the reasons why Tally breaks her promise to keep Shay’s secret that she’s running away and helps Special Circumstances find her and the Smoke—on some level, Tally believes that Shay, and the other uglies who have escaped there, are in need of saving.
Though Tally tries hard to make herself believe she’s doing Shay and the other runaway uglies a favor by cooperating with Special Circumstances, Tally knows and admits outright that she’s doing it as much for herself (so that she can receive her pretty operation, which the Special Circumstances agent Dr. Cable insists she’ll never get if she doesn’t cooperate) as she is for Shay. In other words, Tally agrees to become a spy and betray her friend in part because of selfish reasons. However, Tally’s selfishness reads more as a very purposeful product of her society than an innate character flaw. Pretties are given everything they want and never have to think about how their actions or desires might negatively affect other people, so it follows that Tally simply has never been encouraged to think much about the human consequences of her actions. Tally has been raised in a society that puts forth prettiness as one’s only goal in life—so given this indoctrination, it’s entirely understandable that going against what Shay wants for her life (especially when it seems so uncouth and undesirable anyway) seems like a fair and expected trade. Once in the Smoke, Tally has second thoughts as soon as she sees how happy Shay is and how committed everyone else at the settlement is to the Smoke’s purpose. This suddenly makes Tally’s selfishness seem way out of line, and it culminates in her choice to burn the locket-shaped tracking device that Dr. Cable gave her. It doesn’t entirely destroy Tally’s chances at becoming pretty, since she could still return to the city, but it does give Shay the opportunity to make her own choice—and if Shay chooses to stay, it allows Tally to honor Shay’s unconventional path.
Though Tally thinks this is the end of her struggles, burning the locket alerts Special Circumstances (unbeknownst to Tally) and leads them right to the Smoke. This results in the capture of most of the residents and, eventually, to Shay undergoing the pretty operation against her will. Tally is then understandably shocked when, two weeks after the attack, she and David (who both escaped the raid) make it back to Special Circumstances headquarters to rescue their friends and discover that Shay is extremely happy as a pretty—and wants Tally to join her. This poses a major ethical dilemma for Tally: she knows that Shay is now the exact thing she never wanted to be, but Shay outright refuses to take the experimental pill that David’s mother, Maddy, develops—which, hopefully, has the power to destroy the lesions in Shay’s brain that make her conform. To make matters even more complicated for Tally, she also knows that as far as ugly Shay was concerned, Tally romantically “stole” David from her. Pretty Shay doesn’t care about David anymore, but Tally also suspects that if Shay’s lesions were to disappear, Shay would once again care and would be justifiably angry at Tally for betraying her and the others in the Smoke, and for stealing David’s affections.
While as the first of a series, Uglies doesn’t fully resolve these questions of what it means to be a loyal friend, Tally does come to the conclusion that even though she believes Shay was duped and forced into becoming a pretty, it’s still unethical and disloyal to sneak her the pills. Instead, Tally decides to give herself over to the authorities, allow them to perform the pretty operation, and then take the experimental pills herself, all with the hope of convincing Shay to do the same. With this, the novel proposes that in order to be a truly loyal friend, a person cannot violate their friends’ autonomy—but they can set an example of what it means to be true to oneself in the hope of helping their friends do the same.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Friendship and Loyalty ThemeTracker
Friendship and Loyalty Quotes in Uglies
“You can’t change it by wishing, or by telling yourself that you’re pretty. That’s why they invented the operation.”
“But it’s a trick, Tally. You’ve only seen pretty faces your whole life. Your parents, your teachers, everyone over sixteen. But you weren’t born expecting that kind of beauty in everyone, all the time. You just got programmed into thinking anything else is ugly.”
“It’s not programming, it’s just a natural reaction. And more important than that, it’s fair.”
“So this is what people looked like before the first pretty? How could anyone stand to open their eyes?”
“Yeah. It’s scary at first. But the weird thing is, if you keep looking at them, you kind of get used to it.”
“Maybe they’re just worried because we’re kids. You know?”
“That’s the problem with the cities, Tally. Everyone’s a kid, pampered and dependent and pretty. Just like they say in school: Big-eyed means vulnerable. Well, like you once told me, you have to grow up sometime.”
Tally remembered crossing the river to New Pretty Town, watching them have their endless fun. She and Peris used to boast they’d never wind up so idiotic, so shallow. But when she’d seen him... “Becoming pretty doesn’t just change the way you look,” she said.
“No,” David said. “It changes the way you think.”
“They carried electricity from a wind farm to one of the old cities.”
Tally frowned. “I didn’t know the Rusties used wind power.”
“They weren’t all crazy. Just most of them.” He shrugged. “You’ve got to remember, we’re mostly descended from the Rusties, and we’re still using their basic technology. Some of them must have had the right idea.”
David nodded. “It’s kind of creepy how well preserved it is. Of all the ruins I’ve seen, it looks the most recent.”
“They sprayed it with something to keep it up for school trips.” And that was her city in a nutshell, Tally realized. Nothing left to itself. Everything turned into a bribe, a warning, or a lesson.
“Yeah, I know what you mean. But that was all ugly stuff. Crazy love and jealousy and needing to rebel against the city. Every kid’s like that. But you grow up, you know?”
“You grew up because of an operation? Doesn’t that strike you as weird?”
“Why did we even have to ask? They didn’t get her permission when they did this to her!”
“That’s the difference between us and them,” Maddy said. “After Az and I found out what the operation really meant, we realized we’d been party to something horrible. People had their minds changed without their knowledge. As doctors, we took an ancient oath never to do anything like that.”
