by Leah Wilson
Although these few vaguely damning assessments of the factionless amount to everything we know about them by the end of Divergent, it is clear that they are going to be a source of unrest. However, it’s not yet obvious that they’re going to sow the seeds of revolution.
The next glimpse we get of the factionless isn’t until nearly a fifth of the way through Insurgent, when Tris, Caleb, Tobias, and Susan leave the Amity compound to return to the city. Their group gets on an unlit moving train only to discover that it is full of factionless—all of them armed, one with a gun. Tris wonders where the gun comes from, but their other weapons are homegrown—a bread knife and a plank of wood with a nail sticking out of it.
Now, for the first time, we get a good look at some of these people. In the darkness, Tris is able to make out that their tattered clothes are a collection of faction colors: one man is wearing “a black [Dauntless] T-shirt with a torn [gray] Abnegation jacket over it, blue jeans mended with red thread, brown boots. All faction clothing is represented in the group before me: black Candor pants paired with black Dauntless shirts, yellow [Amity] dresses with blue [Erudite] sweatshirts over them.” Tris assumes the clothes are stolen, but that’s showing her learned prejudice about the factionless; there’s no reason to believe these clothes aren’t just handouts or rejects, or even purposefully created disguises. Also, though Tris doesn’t know it yet, there is a large Divergent population among the factionless, which is subtly foreshadowed in their multicolored clothing.
The man with the gun turns out to be Edward, one of the unsuccessful Dauntless initiates from Tris’ own group. And this simple fact makes the encounter so much more intense. It’s no longer one group of desperate strangers confronting another: it becomes a conflict between people who know each other. Their potentially conflicting purposes are bound together, and this bond is pulled tight when Tobias tells the factionless group his name—Tobias Eaton—and is recognized by them in turn.
Now, finally, the reader gets to see how the factionless really live and gets a glimpse of who they really are. Like the homeless of our own world, these people are in fact just ordinary people who have fallen on hard times. The connection between Tris’ life and that of the factionless is emphasized in the way she actually recognizes the battered buildings and fallen streetlights as she enters the factionless neighborhood—this isn’t new territory for her. This is the way she used to walk to school, the landscape of her childhood, familiar.
Deeper into the factionless sector, the street stinks of garbage, rats scamper among piles of trash and rubble, and when Tris and her group finally enter a building the windows are so grimy that they don’t allow light to pass through. The interior is like a refugee shelter: a communal space where people of all ages cook, eat, live, and sleep. They chat and tell stories; children are playing. When they eat, they pass food from hand to hand, everyone sharing from the same pot or can. The sense of unity and loyalty is striking, nor is it lost on Tris. She realizes, for the first time, that “the factionless, who are supposed to be scattered, isolated, and without community . . . are together . . . like a faction.”
Edward explains that they’ve been a coherent group for some time—in fact, since Abnegation started supplying them with food, clothes, and tools. But another, bigger shock about the factionless awaits Tris—the fact that Tobias’ mother, Evelyn, whose funeral Tris herself attended, is alive and leading them. So the rumors do have foundation—there is a movement astir among the factionless not just to take control of their own fate, but of that of the greater faction society in which they live. They are emergent.
Evelyn’s organized. Her office is hung with maps detailing Divergent populations and factionless safe houses. The safe houses communicate by painting coded messages on billboards—“Codes formed out of personal informtion—so-and-so’s favorite color, someone else’s childhood pet”—and I can’t help thinking of the radio codes sent from free London to Resistance groups in Nazi-occupied Europe doing exactly the same thing. The factionless are now revealed as a resistance group, both a grassroots and a guerrilla organization. But painting pictures on billboards is a slow, difficult means of communication; Caleb comments that “news takes a while to travel among the factionless.” They lack the technology and the resources that are available to their enemies.
Evelyn reveals that the factionless have the highest population of Divergent in the city. Though neither Tris nor the reader knows it yet, what this actually means is that the factionless have the highest population of genetically healed people in the city. Being factionless is one of the things that saves many of the Divergent, for Jeanine mistakenly believes them to be largely among the Abnegation, whom she mostly succeeds in destroying. In opposition to Jeanine’s plot, the goal of the factionless is to overthrow Erudite, to “establish a new society. One without factions.”
During Tris’ first real encounter with the factionless, Edward explains to her that most of them are from Dauntless, “then Erudite, then Candor, then a handful of Amity.” Very few Abnegation become factionless during initiation, so their only representation is those few who survive the simulation attack at the end of Divergent; Susan reveals that there is a large group of Abnegation members living in one of the factionless safe houses. It’s fair to say that the Chicago factionless at the end of Insurgent represent all factions, in addition to the Divergent—they are an integrated population.
Evelyn convinces Tobias to attempt to merge the loyal Dauntless (those who haven’t joined Jeanine) in an alliance with the remaining factionless population. Evelyn knows there will be “destruction” involved in her coming revolution, and she hopes the Dauntless will be able to provide her followers with much-needed weapons and skills. Her terms are conditional—she wants to ensure that the factionless are allowed a place in the resulting government and are given full control of Erudite data, which they intend to destroy.
In the meantime, the factionless continue their traditional dependence on Abnegation, using Abnegation housing—an improvement on “cardboard boxes that contain frayed blankets and stained pillows”—even though the remaining Abnegation, under the leadership of Tobias’ father, are staying well out of their way. The scene of happy camaraderie that greets Tris when she stays in Tobias’ house before the battle against Erudite is like something in a dream for her—here in a house hauntingly similar to the one where she spent her austere childhood, there is music and laughter and card games, people sharing food and sofas, people touching each other for comfort without being self-conscious about it.
“This is not what I was taught to expect of faction-lessness,” Tris thinks. “I was taught that it was worse than death.”
But did she ever really believe that? Maybe in her heart of hearts she knew that what she’d been taught was a load of propaganda. She’s easily led, but good at sniffing out truth. While she’s still a schoolgirl, before she chooses her own faction, Tris states that for herself and her peers “our worst fear, greater even than the fear of death [is] to be factionless.” It’s a fear that’s programmed into her. She is reminded of this at the Choosing Ceremony when Marcus tells the initiates, “Apart from [the factions], we would not survive.” Yet obviously, the factionless do survive, even before Evelyn becomes their leader.
The most telling indicator that being factionless is not everybody’s worst fear is that the factionless—or becoming factionless—isn’t a feature of any fear landscape we see in the trilogy. Tris has got to realize that the work the factionless do is not necessarily life threatening or soul destroying: that driving a bus or a train is a learned skill, not a punishment; that garbage has to be collected on a regular, organized basis, and it doesn’t have to be the work of slave labor; that these less-attractive contributions to society are in fact vital to civilization (no one in Tris’ Chicago would ever get anywhere without that reliable, punctual, frequent, free metropolitan rail service, which continues to run on time at all hours of the day and night throughout the entire faction
war).
The lesson Tris learns in Insurgent is that “[The factionless] are not characterized by a particular virtue. They claim all colors, all activities, all virtues, and all flaws as their own.” Of course this is also true of the Divergent, like Tris, who are capable of a limitless range of emotions and talents. Tris, too, can claim all virtues and flaws as her own. She can claim responsibility for her own actions.
The planned alliance between Dauntless and the factionless is threatened when Tobias agrees to betray all the factionless safe houses to spare Tris from Jeanine’s torture—a risky breach in the battle lines, which is only saved by the fact that some of them have already left the safe houses and that there are more Divergent among the factionless than Jeanine realizes. A subtler flaw in this alliance, which Evelyn surely doesn’t take into account, is that Tris doesn’t really believe in it. She’s concerned about the aftermath of the destruction of Erudite, which she—and most other people, since it’s in the Faction History textbook—see as an “essential” faction, since they provide all of society’s medical care and information technology. Even though Tris has now seen the factionless for herself, has experienced their doctoring and witnessed their adaptability and mechanical aptitude (they recondition abandoned motor vehicles, among other things)—and even though Tris is Divergent herself—she’s still so much a product of the faction system that she doubts her world can survive without it. Her concerns “spill out” as she explains to Johanna, in their moonlit meeting at the Amity compound, “The Dauntless have allied with the factionless, and they plan to destroy all of Erudite, leaving us without one of the two essential factions. I tell her that there is important information in the Erudite compound . . . that especially needs to be recovered.” For a faction transfer and a Divergent with aptitude for three different factions, Tris is astonishingly loyal to the system in which she’s grown up.
But more than that, Tris is loyal to her parents. The fact that her parents died trying to protect the Erudite data from destruction is a strong motivation for her to want to protect it as well. Tris’ devotion to her family is always the deciding factor for her, overriding all her other loyalties.
So there are a number of issues affecting Tris’ decision to leave the factionless and become “Insurgent,” as Fernando labels the small band of rebels who want to make sure the Erudite records are not destroyed. Fernando defines an “Insurgent” as “a person who acts in opposition to the established authority, who is not necessarily regarded as belligerent.” Tris, who is willing and able to fight if she has to, does not like to see people get hurt, and her instinct about the misguided tactics of the factionless is right on target. As the factionless take over Dauntless weapons, in the manner of so many revolutionaries before them, they prove uncontrollably violent in rebellion.
Evelyn, as the leader of the factionless, has rightly guessed that those who call themselves “Insurgent” are too conditioned to the faction system to allow it to fall apart. It is neither battle nor negotiation that convinces Tris a new way forward might be necessary; it takes a message from outside—the recording made by Edith Prior—to wake Tris up to the fact that there might actually be a higher power outside the fence pulling the strings of her world.
By the end of Insurgent and the beginning of Allegiant, the emergent factionless have embraced their identity as a cohesive group, which is inherently a kind of faction of its own. Now they have designed their own symbol, an empty circle, which they wear proudly. They become armed vigilantes, prowling the streets of Chicago and shooting or beating up anyone wearing a faction symbol. They issue orders for existing faction members to mix their color-coded clothing; no more than four members of any faction are allowed to live together in the same building. Gone is the caring group dynamic Tris witnessed in Tobias’ house; card games have been replaced with riotous violence. “Death to the factions!” is the battle cry of the factionless.
Poor Evelyn—she’d really like the revolution to be a success. She’s a pure communist at heart. Obsessed with rules, she tries to organize jobs on a rotation basis, with a united society in which every member makes an equal contribution to the life of the city. She is able to stop the chaos in Erudite headquarters at the close of Insurgent with a few commands. But she is perceived to be a tyrant and a dictator by those fighting against her, and when she’s not on the scene her factionless rabble are all too willing to take matters into their own hands. Their bloodthirst is heartbreakingly illustrated in their unprovoked attack on the Candor boy who they claim is violating the “dress code.” They hold public trials for traitors but make the trials private when the verdict is “obvious.” Their “emergent” status has indeed evolved into an “emergency.”
However, the factionless are not the only group capable of revolution in the world of the Divergent trilogy. Equality, and the need for change when a society fails to treat its members fairly, seems to be an issue that is unlimited by faction boundaries, personality differences, or genetic mutations. Not surprisingly, the inequalities of the factionless military dictatorship inspire yet another rebellion: that of the Allegiant—those who are loyal to the faction system, similar to Tris’ small band of Insurgent in the previous book. So it’s no surprise that Tris becomes Allegiant herself. But though both groups share a common loyalty to the faction system, Allegiant represents faction loyalty with a difference. The Allegiant want to help the Divergent among them. And so a group of them leave the city and finally discover the world outside the fence. This is where they will find the answers to the questions Edith Prior’s video raised, the ability to change, and the true solution to all their societal issues.
Veronica Roth does a very daring thing as the author of this trilogy—she feeds us information through Tris’ limited understanding for two entire books, making the reader wait with bated breath for the saga to continue until we are able to find out the bigger picture. In the world of Divergent and Insurgent, the limited landscape of the fenced-in city is all we know, all anyone knows, and there are so many questions that the reader can ask about this world: Where does the steady supply of electricity and water come from? Where do material supplies come from—dishes, medicine, computers, watches, furniture, railway cars? How come the trains always run on time?
Not until the third book do we get the revelation of the puppeteers behind the puppet show and realize that Tris’ sheltered life in faction society has left her incredibly naïve as to how a functional society is supposed to work. When Zoe tells her about the uniforms for support staff in the Bureau of Genetic Welfare, Tris’ first reaction is that these people must be like the factionless simply because they’re doing jobs no one else wants to do. Zoe corrects her gently: “Everyone does what they can . . . Everyone is valued and important.” But again, Tris’ instincts are dead on target. Just because these people are “valued and important” doesn’t mean they’re not segregated. There is a class difference at work here, too—the difference between the genetically pure and the genetically damaged.
Tris recognizes the unfairness of the situation even before she knows the reason for it, just as she recognizes that the fringe occupies the marginal position in outside-the-fence society that the factionless occupied inside-the-fence. Tris has an eye for spotting society’s dispossessed. She’s shocked by the torn clothes and desperate sleeping conditions of those living outside government society, worries about how the fringe copes during winter weather, and is amazed and proud to discover that her mother’s background is so rooted in the very life she finds so appalling.
There are some important differences between the fringe and the factionless, however. For one thing, the fringe’s territory is huge, stretching between Chicago and Milwaukee. But the truly significant difference is that while the factionless are society’s outcasts, many of those who inhabit the fringe have chosen to live outside society. The fringe have actively rejected the system; the factionless were rejected by it. By their very nature the people of the fringe are revolutionaries.
It is a slower and more subtle revolution than the armed resistance of the factionless, and one that continues to thrive despite occasional doses of memory serum administered by the government when they attempt raids outside their territory.
Tris’ mother, in her journey from fringe vagrant to government mole in Dauntless to Abnegation charity worker, is a shining example of how quiet persistence can also be a form of revolution. In fact, the fringe, like the factionless, could also be described as emergent, as its members rise from obscurity and inferiority to become key players in the reform of society.
In the final showdown in factionless headquarters—formerly Erudite headquarters—when Tobias goes to confront Evelyn, the gun-toting, unreasonable, faceless factionless are given a face and voice in Grace, a former Abnegation member Tobias recognizes from his childhood. It is Grace who leads Tobias to meet Evelyn. She carries a gun now, unthinkable for Abnegation. But she is not using it for mindless violence. She is defending herself. Seeing her, Tobias recognizes that the Abnegation were “just as broken as the other factions.” Grace, who in defending herself has broken away from her Abnegation roots, reminds the reader through her personal growth of what Tris and her companions are really trying to achieve: a peaceful solution in which individuals are able to live in harmony on their own terms.
The world of the Divergent trilogy is often a world of stark contrasts: the black and white of Candor; the jump-or-die lifestyle of the Dauntless; the irrevocable choice at the age of sixteen to leave your family forever. There is no room here for hesitation, no room for diversity. The factionless, who embrace the Divergent and wear the colors of all factions, bring about the beginnings of revolution. But as a group they’re only able to see the violent side of revolution. You can’t change a society just by holding it at gunpoint. Reflection, tolerance, organization, and patience are also necessary ingredients for change.