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The following discussion question was included in some copies of the June book of the month, Divergent by Veronica Roth.

What was the reason behind the creation of the factions? Do you think the factions are working "toward a better society and a better world" (p. 44) as they say they are? What about the structure seems to be working for Tris’s society? What doesn’t seem to be working at all?

I think its kinda like the Hunger Games books. They split them up to avoid rebellion... obviously it didnt work for that reason

the factions were created to help keep peace and order and to maintain the balance. It didn't work out as we found out...

The factions were supposed to keep the peace by keeping people in their places. However, it provided a situation where the right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing and that led to the conflict.

Since this is a dystopian society, I believe the factions were created to give the government control over the people. The factions separate people into their own groups, and keep them from exploring their potential for greatness and other traits. This prevents unity and rebellion. The concept of them working towards a "better society" is just a bunch of pretty words they say to keep everybody happy with the system, but it's not true. They want to eliminate the threats to the system, like Divergents, because they don't belong in any one group and thus they can't be controlled.

CrescentMoon wrote:Since this is a dystopian society, I believe the factions were created to give the government control over the people. The factions separate people into their own groups, and keep them from exploring their potential for greatness and other traits. This prevents unity and rebellion. The concept of them working towards a "better society" is just a bunch of pretty words they say to keep everybody happy with the system, but it's not true. They want to eliminate the threats to the system, like Divergents, because they don't belong in any one group and thus they can't be controlled.

I agree with your opinion. It is about the "Big Brother" watching and controlling the people in its realm. Many people say this is a dystopian society, however, not everybody was displeased with their faction. In fact I think the factions prevented its society from becoming a society characterized by its misery. So at one level the faction idea worked, people like Four's father thrived in his faction, as did the other leaders of the other factions, including Tris' parents. However, because another government's purpose for the faction system was control, it was doomed to fail, because their end game allowed them to interfere and execute a different purpose for the faction system. There is no such thing as a perfect society, because all humans are imperfect. However, the idea of a faction system was fun to read.

In theory separating people to encourage the success of certain traits is a logical idea, but the big thing that was not planned for was that what they were separating were people. Everyone spends time with people exactly like them and that gets so boring that you go find new, different people. By making people conform to the rules of each faction the eliminated to creativity that is needed to make society run. The creativity which develops new ideas for change. When society does not change people are thrust backwards in developing the world for better and history is doomed to repeat itself.

The factions were created to maintain order and encourage traits but I don't think it would ever have worked because no two people are the same, though through circumstances people may have similar traits but those traits are reflected differently in everyone.

The factions were supposed to keep the peace and maintain order by dividing people up as to where they belong but as we saw, it doesn't work. I think it speaks a lot about Communism. They try to do the same thing, deciding what jobs people are going to have and where they are going to live, and as we have seen throughout history.............it doesn't work.

As I was reading the book I was constantly reminded of Lois Lowry's The Giver, where on paper everything sounded reasonable, but in practice it failed horribly. That is the sensation I got with Divergent. I also think that it was very clever to describe each fraction by its virtue because it becomes a distraction from what really is happening.
I do think that idea was a little commonplace because I can think of a whole bunch of other novels that have a very similar dystopian layout that simulates order. Brave New World, Guilliver's Travels (book 4), The Handmaid's Tale, to name a few.

The factions were designed to keep the peace. What did work was that you had all these organized groups with a specific specialty. In theory, it sounds great. What didn't work, was the Spain between the groups, the hard line. There is no creativity, no inner workings for improvement, no one knew what was really going on all of the time.

It can't work because if this is to mirror a utopia, there's no harmony between them. You can't have a perfect society and have a large portion of your group "factionless" Also, the fact that there's so much hatred towards faction trading at the ceremonies shows that each group thinks as highly of themselves as they do for hating those that are not like them.

I found that the least believable part of the book, actually. In the world I live in, various people champion various virtues, but there is NO WAY they would agree to let another part of society live by a different virtue. So it's really hard to imagine how this all came about.

But I was completely willing to skip over those worries, because the ideas of grouping people by values/personality type is a fascinating premise and made a great story.

Putting people into factions is not a good idea. This allows factionalism and sectarianism to flourish. we will even see some examples of this today, people thinking that they're better than another group of people based on some notion of superiority.

The factions were created in the beginning to keep peace. People with certain traits were divides into the faction where they belong. In theory, it sounds like a great idea, but turns out, it caused chaos between the factions.