Uglies

by

Scott Westerfeld

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The Natural World, History, and Growing Up Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Conformity vs. Individuality Theme Icon
Beauty, Science, and Influence Theme Icon
The Natural World, History, and Growing Up Theme Icon
Friendship and Loyalty Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Uglies, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Natural World, History, and Growing Up Theme Icon

For uglies in Uglyville, having their operation to become pretty and moving to New Pretty Town is the agreed-upon definition of growing up. This trajectory also follows the broader arc of civilization in Uglies: after a horrifying manmade disaster, the few survivors of the Rusties (the civilization on Earth prior to Tally’s society) built the cities and developed the society that Tally inhabits several hundred hears later—and her society is one that, in her opinion, doesn’t abuse nature like the Rusties once did. However, as Tally moves into the natural world herself through her journey to the Smoke, she learns things about the Rusties—and her own society—that muddy her belief in her society’s superiority, especially when it comes to what it means to grow up. By drawing out clear parallels and comparisons between Tally’s civilization, the Rusties’ civilization, and the untamed natural world, Uglies is able to show that growing up doesn’t just mean undergoing surgery and moving to a new part of town. Rather, growing up entails expanding one’s horizons to learn about the wider world and other cultures, as well as accepting that civilization may not hold all the answers.

Tally’s teachers portray the Rusties in a consistently negative light—she mentions at several points that her teachers never missed an opportunity to denigrate their predecessors. Tally’s society sees the Rusties (a society based on mid-2000s America) as wildly unintelligent, greedy, and ugly. It’s considered horrific that the Rusties killed trees and animals until a fiery disaster stopped this destruction by burning most of the Rusties and their cities. The Rusties’ world was also one in which racism and discrimination based on people’s looks was common, and as far as young people in the novel’s present are concerned, the Rusties knew they were headed for destruction and did nothing to try to save themselves. Tally’s society, meanwhile, seeks to fix these perceived flaws, most notably by carrying out the pretty surgeries so that discrimination based on looks simply doesn’t exist. However, this isn’t the only way they seek to distance themselves from the Rusties. Rather than use wood or animal products, everything people eat is soy-based, and all technology and things that run on electricity are solar-powered. Everything discarded is recycled immediately, and people are better able to make use of space by building vertically via “hoverstruts,” or magnetically-powered poles that thrust buildings high into the air. Furthermore, people seldom venture into the natural world—it is, after all, not meant for humans. Why, Tally asks, would anyone want to spend time in nature (save for a few childhood camping trips) where they have to work so hard to survive, when instead they can have all their needs met in the cities? At first, the answer seems obvious to Tally: no one would.

However, Tally eventually begins to rethink her answer, especially when she sees the difference between David, who was raised entirely in the Smoke (the secret settlement of uglies who don’t want to become pretty), and other uglies from the city like Tally. As Tally begins to lean into and enjoy the hard work necessary to live in the Smoke, she realizes that she has purpose for the first time in her life. As a worker, she’s part of a larger effort to make life better for everyone—whereas pretties don’t have to do anything but party. Eventually, life as a pretty begins to seem small and meaningless, especially once Tally also learns about the personality-altering brain lesions that come with the pretty operation. Becoming pretty, she starts to understand, means moving into a lifelong childish state of dependence in which one never fully comes of age.

The natural world itself also gives Tally lots to think about in terms of how she thinks about being pretty and adult. Tally has grown up believing that in order to be an adult, she must undergo the pretty operation and change how she looks—but the natural world begins to push back on this idea. The environment doesn’t need an operation to be beautiful; it just is. As this understanding takes hold, Tally begins to apply this idea to herself and gradually comes to believe in the Smoke’s mission: to give uglies the choice of whether to undergo the operation or not, and to teach people to focus on who they naturally are, rather than on who their city wants them to be.

While the natural world gives Tally a place in which to grow and think, possibly more important to her own coming of age are the things she learns about the Rusties and how they met their downfall. David and his mother, Maddy, explain that the Rusties all died because their society was too dependent on oil, and a new bacteria infected all their oil and caused it to explode. While this clearly speaks to the Rusties’ dangerous dependence on oil (as well as their love of flammable building materials), Tally also learns that the Rusties used wind and solar energy—they may have made some bad choices, but they weren’t entirely bad people and even made some good choices. In learning this, Tally is forced to confront that her current society may be making different mistakes than the Rusties did, but they’re not flawless either. They may run on solar power, for instance, but they still alter the brains of their young people without consent to make them more pliant and unquestioning. Through this, Tally begins to view her current society as an adult version of the Rusties, the Rusties as an adult version of the pre-Rusties (presumably, Indigenous peoples), and the natural world as a fountain of undeveloped, beautiful potential that the novel suggests is akin to that of young people. Maturity and coming of age, the novel shows, happen as individuals or societies make choices about who they want to be, based on what they see of the present and learn of the past—and some of those choices will, inevitably, be mistakes.

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The Natural World, History, and Growing Up Quotes in Uglies

Below you will find the important quotes in Uglies related to the theme of The Natural World, History, and Growing Up.
Facing the Future Quotes

“Yeah, and people killed each other over stuff like having different skin color.” Tally shook her head. No matter how many times they repeated it at school, she’d never really quite believed that one. “So what if people look more alike now? It’s the only way to make people equal.”

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood (speaker), Shay
Page Number: 43
Explanation and Analysis:
Rapids Quotes

“I didn’t know these things weighed so much.”

“Yeah, this is what a board weighs when it’s not hovering. Out here, you find out that the city fools you about how things really work.”

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood (speaker), Shay (speaker)
Related Symbols: Hoverboards
Page Number: 57
Explanation and Analysis:
The Rusty Ruins Quotes

On school trips, the teachers always made the Rusties out to be so stupid. You almost couldn’t believe people lived like this, burning trees to clear land, burning oil for heat and power, setting the atmosphere on fire with their weapons. But in the moonlight she could imagine people scrambling over flaming cars to escape the crumbling city, panicking in their flight from this untenable pile of metal and stone.

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood, Shay
Page Number: 60
Explanation and Analysis:
Fight Quotes

“Look, Skinny, I’m with you,” Tally said sharply. “Doing tricks is great! Okay? Breaking the rules is fun! But eventually you’ve got to do something besides being a clever little ugly.”

“Like being a vapid, boring pretty?”

“No, like being an adult. Did you ever think that when you’re pretty you might not need to play tricks and mess things up? Maybe just being ugly is why uglies always fight and pick on one another, because they aren’t happy with who they are. Well, I want to be happy, and looking like a real person is the first step.”

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood (speaker), Shay (speaker)
Page Number: 80
Explanation and Analysis:
Spagbol Quotes

Mountains rose up on her right, tall enough that snow capped their tops even in the early autumn chill. Tally had always thought of the city as huge, a whole world in itself, but the scale of everything out here was so much grander. And so beautiful. She could see why people used to live out in nature, even if there weren’t any party towers or mansions. Or even dorms.

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood
Related Symbols: Hoverboards
Page Number: 147
Explanation and Analysis:
The Side You Despise Quotes

The flying machine had been just like what Tally imagined when her teachers had described Rusty contraptions: a portable tornado crashing along, destroying everything in its path. [...]

But the Rusties had been gone a long time. Who would be stupid enough to rebuild their insane machines?

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood, Tonk, Jenks
Page Number: 160
Explanation and Analysis:
Bug Eyes Quotes

Tally sat back, shaking her head, coughing once more. The flowers were so beautiful, so delicate and unthreatening, but they choked everything around them.

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood, Tonk
Related Symbols: White Tiger Orchids
Page Number: 174
Explanation and Analysis:
Lies Quotes

The boy smiled again. He was an ugly, but he had a nice smile. And his face held a kind of confidence that Tally had never seen in an ugly before. Maybe he was a few years older than she was. Tally had never watched anyone mature naturally past age sixteen. She wondered how much of being ugly was just an awkward age.

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood, Shay, David
Page Number: 181
Explanation and Analysis:
Heartthrob Quotes

“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.”

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood (speaker), Shay (speaker)
Page Number: 216
Explanation and Analysis:
Suspicion Quotes

The physical beauty of the Smoke also cleared her mind of worries. Every day seemed to change the mountain, the sky, and the surrounding valleys, making them spectacular in a completely new way. Nature, at least, didn’t need an operation to be beautiful. It just was.

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood, Shay, David
Page Number: 219
Explanation and Analysis:
Bravery Quotes

Then Tally trembled inside, realizing what the feeling was. It was the same warmth she’d felt talking to Peris after his operation, or when teachers looked at her with approval. It was not a feeling she’d ever gotten from an ugly before. Without large, perfectly shaped eyes, their faces couldn’t make you feel that way. But the moonlight and the setting, or maybe just the words he was saying, had somehow turned David into a pretty. Just for a moment.

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood, David, Peris
Page Number: 236-37
Explanation and Analysis:
Pretty Minds Quotes

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.”

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood (speaker), David (speaker), Maddy, Peris, Az
Page Number: 254
Explanation and Analysis:
Burning Bridges Quotes

For that matter, shallow and self-centered was how brand-new pretties were supposed to be. As an ugly, Peris had made fun of them—but he hadn’t waited a moment to join in the fun. No one ever did. So how could you tell how much was the operation and how much was just people going along with the way things had always been?

Only by making a whole new world, which is just what Maddy and Az had begun to do.

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood, David, Maddy, Peris, Az
Page Number: 258
Explanation and Analysis:
The Oil Plague Quotes

“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.”

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood (speaker), David (speaker)
Related Symbols: Hoverboards
Page Number: 326
Explanation and Analysis:

It was hard to think of the Rusties as actual people, rather than as just an idiotic, dangerous, and sometimes comic force of history. But there were human beings down there, whatever was left of them after a couple of hundred years, still sitting in their blackened cars, as if still trying to escape their fate.

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood, David
Page Number: 330
Explanation and Analysis:
Familiar Sights Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood (speaker), David (speaker)
Page Number: 334
Explanation and Analysis:
Getaway Quotes

“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?”

Related Characters: Tally Youngblood (speaker), Shay (speaker), David
Page Number: 376
Explanation and Analysis: