“Lemon is an eventual librarian who reads dystopian YA novels by the barrelful...”
...so reads my bio on the front page of this site. But I don’t talk much about YA or dystopian fiction, even though by page count it’s probably the majority of what I read. Often it’s because I read those books more for enjoyment than analysis, which I’ve come to realize is a disservice both to those books and to everything I believe about young adult literature. Consider this me catching up.
Though the worlds of each of the currently incredibly popular dystopian books are different, they (nearly) all have one thing in common: structure. In The Giver, everyone is assigned a career, spouse, children, etc, and the beginning of adolescence is celebrated with a pill to suppress sexual urges. In Divergent, people categorize themselves, and each faction organizes itself based on the strengths of its members, according to the traits they define themselves with. In Delirium, love is considered an illness, and every citizen is inoculated against it once they're of age. Shades of Gray depicts a world in which people are valued according to the colors they can see and the degree to which they can see them, creating a very ordered class system with few variables.
The reason dystopian and fantasy novels like these are so often aimed at young adults is that young people in these stories are the only unpredictable thing: old enough to think for themselves and to fall in love, but not old enough that they’ve taken their place in the system and lose control of their choices. Their stories usually start with them buying into the structure, until some event or person becomes the catalyst for their questioning. Sometimes this leads to all-out revolution, a la The Hunger Games, or to a smaller-scale change, like Jonas releasing a single community’s suppressed memories in one overwhelming moment at the end of The Giver.
Here’s why I find this interesting. Young adults often see the world of adulthood as ordered and predictable, and there comes a point for everyone when you realize that it isn’t. I don’t think there will ever be a time when I won’t find that moment interesting. Call it a coming-of-age story, call it a bildungsroman, whatever-- but that moment has been a staple of literature for decades, if not centuries. In a dystopian setting, the world of adults actually is strictly structured, but full of flaws that real-life adults often fall into, though they do it on a more individual basis. The structures deny fundamental aspects of being a person, like falling in love, freedom of choice and remembering their history, whether personal or shared. It’s up to the next generation, as it is in the real world, to learn from the mistakes of those who came before them and be better, to break free and show the rest of the society a better way.
In these novels, they’re usually the only ones who can affect change in a much more literal sense-- they’re the only ones who haven’t been assigned a faction, or who haven’t been given drugs to prevent rebellion, or whatever the totalitarian regime’s soup du jour happens to be. In reality, young adults aren’t the only ones capable of making changes, but they’re often the only ones likely to. Their perspective hasn’t been cemented yet, and the entire world serves as a cautionary tale.
The premises of these novels are rarely based on something that could never happen. Most of them rely on an unspecified apocalyptic event, presumably a nuclear war, to wipe out existing governments, and examine how the world would choose to reshape itself afterwards. The new government does whatever it does in the name of protecting its citizens. All these people have built their society and their lives around avoiding something, avoiding whatever it is they’ve determined is the enemy. The young people (is there any term here that sounds natural? The teenagers? The youths?) are on the outside of that decision looking in, and they don’t think it makes sense. They see both good and bad in the thing their parents or grandparents have decided to exclude from their lives, and they want access-- to memories, to love, and most importantly to freedom of choice. And they’re willing to fight for it in the way the adults around them are not.
This is why I’m so interested in these stories. What are we organizing our lives around avoiding, and why are we doing it? Is there something we want to save the next generation from, and is there a chance we’d be better off letting them save us instead? If our safety was taken away, what would we sacrifice to get it back? These novels, and others like them, give me a chance to ask those questions in a way that’s just distant enough to give a little objectivity, but close enough to make me realize their importance.
With every new dystopian book I pick up, I start out thinking about the positives of the world they’ve created. Most of them seem comfortable and easy. It’s only by following them through to their conclusions that I find out that thinking is a flaw in myself, that I value security over doing the right thing too often. I need these stories, and people like these characters, to remind me that just because reality isn’t comfortable or easy doesn’t mean those things should be my goal. There are more important things, and I’m thankful I can read these books to figure that out rather than going through a nuclear apocalypse.
-Lemon
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